What’s Happening at the U of Michigan around IT Strategy
Dan is Associate VP for Research Cyberinfrastructure
- Principle 1: Borromean Ring to show synergy: If you remove one ring they fall apart. Three rings are Provisioning, Transformation and System Innovation.
- P2: Never doubt that we can change the world.
- P3: Innovate on the edge–create your own skunk works.
- P4: Invest.
- P5: Lee Iacocca told me to invest in people and let them go.
- P6: MBA 101: Align Mission/Goals, Authority and …
- P7: Conceptual shift to High Performance COLLABORATION.
We are in the course of a revolution–escience is alive and well all over the world. CI enabled humanities is on the way. CI enabled learning is coming soon–lifelong and life wide. The mission of the university is Discovery, learning and societal engagement.
There is a balancing act between sharing tools and domain specific tools. We need to also pay attention to the NEW stuff.
At Michigan we are talking about whether we can create a university shared CI that will be comprehensive and be cost-effective, greener, etc.
This is a top-down approach, from the state (NextGen Michigan is a new organization) to the campus. There are domain stewards who are responsible for aspects of the university IT mission. They serve on a university IT council.
They are working towards a more effective, more efficient and greener IT/CI organization that serves the university.
My stewardship role to to nurture the relationship between research and CI.
I’ve created Computation and Information Resources for Research as a Utility Service (CIRRUS) project. this is related to the NextGen project. This project has a huge number of parts (Dan apparently likes details.)
[It occurs to me that the MAC has become the dominant computer at these sorts of meetings. There are more and more adopters of the MAC. At this point, being for the underdog in our community means adopting the dominant technology!]
NetxtGen also has a lot of parts but needs them to really provide a roadmap for the whole state.
Bringing up our own machines in three phases going from a 128 core system to a 10 core system.
Summary: We are evolving from unit-level to campus-level provisioning, pay as you go model, the datacenter has very different policies surrounding its use than other data center space that academic units are familiar with.
- Efficies will increase.
- All of this represents a change over the status quo
- There will be discussions about pacing size total costs and how costs are allocated.
Questions: How are you going to adjust with different privacy and security requirements in regular academic computing?
Comment: If the medical center can run secure systems, then we can as well.
Question: How will you charge?
Comment: It may be paid by the user or by the college.
Q: What about students?
C: Someone is going to pay. There will be flux.
Q: Why invest more money in Michigan’s infrastructure when you are so successful in gaining research $$$ already?
C: Well, it’s more about the faculty who may be limiting what they can do because of the size of the resources. We have to stay at the leading edge. There’s new science. Part of it is taking the long view.
Stan: It’s quite a gift to see how one of the leading universities is about to do something.