May 24, 2005 | In
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Under Construction
Bids were opened Tuesday, May 24, for some of the Phase III work on ITS Manning. Phase III is "finishing" work, but is fairly extensive. And there was good news and bad news.
There were 23 bid packages all together; however, late changes to building plans necessitated the delay of bids on mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) work. Those bids will be opened in two weeks, on June 7.
At least three bids must be submitted in a category in order for any bids in that category to be opened. Thirteen classifications (landscape and irrigation, "hardscape" and site assemblies, masonry and architectural precast, millwork and finish carpentry, roofing and accessories, fireproofing, glass assemblies, passage door assemblies, service door assemblies, hard tile, other floor covering, painting and wall covering, and miscellaneous specialties) drew zero, one, or two bids each and so could not be awarded. June 7 will be the re-bid date for those. At a re-bid, any qualified bids submitted are considered, regardless of how many bids are submitted. A "qualified" bid is one that meets all State standards for supporting documentation and a bid bond--a way of showing that the contractor is making a good-faith effort on the estimate.
Tuesday's successful bids included those for drywall assemblies (Shields Drywall Inc., best of 3 qualified), window treatments (Commonwealth Blinds and Shades, only 1 qualified), fire protection (Quality Sprinkler, best of 4), telecommunications (Globe Communications, best of 4), acoustical assemblies (Acousti Engineering, best of 3), and access floor systems (Acoustics, Inc., best of 3).
Some unwelcome news was that the foundations will not be poured until Thursday, May 26, because borings underneath the old Bennett building revealed unstable soil. Rodgers Hardin, the general contractor, expects to lay a 5-foot-thick stone "bridge" on which to lay the foundations. However, once that step is complete, workers might be able to make up for lost time because that bridge will be uniform across the site; there won't be different conditions to consider at each bore.
The good news from Tuesday was that the bids awarded are under budget so far. That money will probably be needed to cover extensive changes in the MEP work, but it's encouraging to everyone involved to have some leeway.--LJB with Mike Harris
May 24, 2005 | In
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Spotlight On
ITS-Messaging (which includes Oracle calendar, e-mail, news servers, and spam protection) is like cleaning house: when it's done right, no one notices. The scope of messaging is expanding all the time. Meet the guys who make it transparent at Carolina.
Stephen Braswell is responsible for Webmail, which last month had 32,000 unique users and 2.6 million logins, and Oracle Calendar. Those kinds of usage levels demand more machines, so Stephen will have enough to keep him busy for a while. Away from work, his interests include good food, music, travel, and computers.
Matt Heinze creates Messaging documentation on help.unc.edu and shares listserv administration duties with Josh Tewell. It takes two of them because Carolina listservs have 1.2 million members and process about 8 million messages every month. Matt is active with his volunteer fire department.
Josh works on listserv administration and mass e-mail. Like Stephen, he enjoys good food and music. He also likes maintaining his house and an aquarium.
If you think you get too much spam now, you don't want to know how bad it would be without Lorris Woods. It's his job to maintain the block list of spammers, which has to be updated about every hour. It's a herculean task: in January of this year, Messaging blocked 7.25 million spam messages out of 16 million total messages, and every month brings about 750,000 more spams than the month before. Last month, Messaging filtered 27.5 million posts. The biggest problem is spammers breaking into machines on campus and using them as sending sources. When Lorris needs a break, he might be found tinkering with his Alfa Romeo.
Chris Colomb oversees all of this and carries out daily operations in inspecting hardware and setting e-mail architectural standards. Once a music performance major, he still enjoys classical music and other fine arts, sailing, aviation, and reading. He is proud that his team puts Carolina ahead of many peer institutions, citing e-mail authentication as an example. "We control for over 100,000 viruses," he says. "Lots of places are just starting to do what we've done for years."--LJB
May 24, 2005 | In
News
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Bulletin Board
The combined divisions of ITS have 193 parking spaces available for the 2005-2006 parking year, which begins August 15. Prices vary by gated or non-gated lot and by pay scale. Parking application forms were distributed through campus mail this week and must be returned to Rebecca Molinary, CB 3420, by this Friday, May 27.
May 24, 2005 | In
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Spotlight On
Enterprise Applications (EA) is responsible for all major ITS application development, both academic and administrative. Core application domain experts work with customers to understand needs; then application developers are assigned to meet development needs. Support and maintenance of existing applications is a significant part of the work of today's Enterprise Applications division.
EA has eight major application focus areas (see the
EA Web site for more information):
- Auxiliary Services
- Financial Services
- Health Services
- Human Resources/Telecommunications Services
- Identity Management Services
- Messaging Services
- Portal Services
- Student Information Services
The ITS reorganization has brought together the ID management, Portal, and Messaging teams with those supporting more traditional back-office or line-of-business applications. This has been a very positive change, as these technologies are important pieces of middleware in projecting a cohesive set of service offerings. The working partnerships that have developed are laying the groundwork for important collaborations, and will be especially important as the campus engages in ongoing updates of our core business and student applications.
The most significant endeavor for EA on the horizon is the development and implementation of a plan for application lifecycling our core applications. Although ITS anticipates beginning the process of readiness assessment and requirements analysis early in the new fiscal year, at this time we do not have a firm timetable. Development of a project roadmap will be critical. Clearly, this will involve most other divisions of ITS--most significantly Communications, Data Management and Infrastructure/Operations--but this effort will be so large that it will touch almost all parts of ITS. Developing project and architectural frameworks will be important to the success of this endeavor.
Enterprise Applications still has many changes on the road ahead. Today's EA is still too insular, with pockets of technology and business knowledge concentrated in the various application focus areas. As it matures, EA will seek to continue to lower the barriers to movement of staff and ideas within the division, but given today's commitments and projects, this will be an evolutionary process.--Joel Dunn with DBM
May 24, 2005 | In
The Student Recreation Center and the HEELS Employee Fitness Center are open on a summer schedule and offer freebies: a two-week trial membership and/or a fitness orientation.
For the SRC, summer hours are only slightly reduced from regular semester hours:
- Monday through Thursday, 6 a.m.- 9 p.m.
- Friday, 6 a.m. - 8 p.m.
- Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
- Sunday, 1 p.m. - 8 p.m.
The HEELS/employee fitness center is open weekdays from noon until 2 p.m., from now through July 29.
Both the SRC and HEELS offer group fitness classes during the summer. Schedules are available on the
Group Fitness page of the SRC Web site.
FREE fitness orientations, generally 45 minutes to 1 hour long, acquaint new users with the cardiovascular and/or strength training equipment and are tailored to your interests. Register at the
Fitness Education page of the SRC Web site (scroll to the bottom for fitness orientation).
All services are available with a gym/pool privilege card (actually an endorsement on your OneCard), which costs $10 a month and can be payroll deducted. If you do not currently have a gym/pool privilege and would like a two-week trial membership, e-mail
atufts@email.unc.edu.
May 24, 2005 | In
News
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Bulletin Board
As we've seen in other reports in which Dan has participated (the PITAC report, the HPC Wire article), funding for supercomputing resources is becoming a critical issue. The Chronicle of Higher Education picks up on the trend in its May 20 issue: " 'There is at the moment a lot of uncertainty,' says Daniel A. Reed, a former director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the vice chancellor for information technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"The science foundation's plans are crucial because its supercomputers offer capabilities that many researchers can't find elsewhere."
The Hub has the whole article for you, subscription-free.
From the issue dated May 20, 2005
Budget Cuts at NSF May Signal a Crisis in Computing
Critics say the U.S. has no clear plan for the future of supercomputers
By VINCENT KIERNAN
Many researchers warn that a crisis looms for academic supercomputing in the United States, largely because of what they see as the National Science Foundation's failure to support the technology adequately.
The agency is the principal source of supercomputing time for most scholarly researchers in the country, yet the foundation decided last fall to withdraw financing for its three supercomputer centers starting in 2008.
What will happen to the centers after that is uncertain. Although NSF officials say they are as committed to supercomputing as ever, many researchers and policy watchers say that the move by the NSF is just the latest sign that the federal government's supercomputing efforts are rudderless.
Even some advisers to the Bush administration have recently called on government agencies to develop a clearer road map for purchasing and operating cutting-edge supercomputers and for developing supercomputer software.
Lawmakers have signaled their concern as well: The House of Representatives passed a bill last month that would require the Bush administration to "provide for sustained access by the research community in the United States to high-performance computing systems that are among the most advanced in the world."
"There is at the moment a lot of uncertainty," says Daniel A. Reed, a former director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the vice chancellor for information technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The science foundation's plans are crucial because its supercomputers offer capabilities that many researchers can't find elsewhere.
Some other federal agencies operate supercomputers that are far more powerful than the NSF's. The NSF's computers are outgunned by machines operated by the Energy Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Naval Oceanographic Office, but researchers in academe generally cannot get access to them unless their research is closely allied to the agencies' work.
Some universities have assembled their own supercomputers, but they are generally less powerful than NSF machines.
The stakes, researchers say, are high, both for the intellectual vitality of academe and for the nation's industrial competitiveness. High-performance computing has evolved into an essential tool for scientists. With complex computer simulations and models, researchers can both compare theoretical predictions against real-world measurements and simulate experiments that they could never actually perform.
"Computing is becoming a third pillar in the sciences," along with experimentation and theoretical research, says Klaus J. Schulten, a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who uses supercomputers to simulate biological processes.
Tighter Purse Strings
The science foundation is spending about $301-million on supercomputing this fiscal year and has requested $307-million for the fiscal year that starts October 1, according to the National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development, a White House unit that tracks high-performance computing.
While that budget request is still substantial, it is far less than what many researchers think is needed. Two years ago, for example, an advisory panel to the National Science Foundation proposed that it should spend more than an additional $1-billion annually on "cyberinfrastructure" projects, including supercomputing.
Little of that additional money has materialized, but the science foundation has embraced the advisory panel's recommendation to emphasize the creation of "ubiquitous, comprehensive digital environments" for researchers to conduct research and collaborate with one another. Many researchers see the science foundation's move to retool its supercomputing program as a step toward shifting supercomputing funds into a broader cyberinfrastructure effort.
Indeed, Arden L. Bement Jr., the director of the science foundation, touted his agency's cyberinfrastructure projects during an address this month to the Internet2 high-speed networking organization -- which includes the universities that employ most of the nation's academic supercomputer users.
"We are reaching a point in which bold, novel research is being hampered by a lack of sophisticated cyber tools, and that is simply unacceptable," Mr. Bement told the conference. "An effective cyberinfrastructure will help ensure that the boldest ideas are not constrained for want of tools."
Even so, some officials say they were surprised by the science foundation's decision last year to allow the five-year contracts for its two principal supercomputer centers to expire: one, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, at the University of California at San Diego; the other, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since making the decision to end financing for the centers, the foundation has provided additional funds to allow them to continue to operate for three more years.
But the ultimate fate of the two centers--as well as that of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, which is operated by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, for which financing also has been withdrawn--is up in the air because the science foundation plans to invite new bids for the operation of supercomputer facilities for researchers.
There is no guarantee that any of the three existing centers will win a contract. And in the short term, while the existing centers are on hold, the NSF is not budgeting any money for buying new computers for the centers, even though their supercomputers are going stale almost as fast as day-old bread.
"Not having a well-defined upgrade path for the center poses a problem for us," says Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, for which NSF has committed $35-million this year, $20-million next year, and $17-million in 2007. "I would say we are missing opportunities because we don't have that technology refresh."
Officials at the science foundation, however, say their plan makes sense and has precedent. In the 1990s, they note, the foundation was underwriting five supercomputer centers but pared its support down to the current three. Competition helps make sure that the centers serve scholars' needs and are making good use of taxpayers' funds, they say.
"Having a relatively large sum of money uncompeted for a long period of time is not a good idea," says Sangtae Kim, director of the science foundation's Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure.
Even if the existing centers do not win the new competition, he says, they will most likely be able to get other grants from the NSF or other agencies, as they do today.
Not Just Big Machines
Supercomputer centers do more these days than just provide time on mammoth machines. The centers have also moved into software and network projects that do not necessarily rely on supercomputers. For example, the Mosaic Web browser, which was the foundation for both Netscape's and Microsoft's browsers, was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Some researchers say that, with that expansion, the supercomputer centers may have strayed from their mission of providing researchers with access to supercomputers.
Consequently, "it's probably appropriate for the NSF to be considering some institutional evolution," says Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and a former director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The California institute, a joint venture of the University of California's Irvine and San Diego campuses, seeks to broaden the reach of the Internet.
But many academic scientists worry that the changes in the mission of these centers and the NSF's financing decisions could upend American supercomputing research. If none of the incumbents win a new contract from the NSF, building a new supercomputer center from scratch would not be easy or inexpensive, they say. It might not even be smart.
"You don't build a highway and decide a few years later that you're going to take it away," says Kelvin K. Droegemeier, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma who relies heavily on supercomputers in his research.
Moreover, the host institutions for the current centers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars, from sources other than the federal government, in the supercomputer centers, and that investment would be lost if the supercomputer centers moved elsewhere, researchers say.
And even if the centers stay where they are, the current cloud of uncertainty is destructive to staff morale, says Russ Miller, a professor of computer science at the State University of New York at Buffalo and director of its Center for Computational Research. "Their jobs can't be hanging in the balance every two years," he says. "Otherwise, they'll all find a more stable position somewhere else."
"I wonder if NSF really understands the turmoil and pain that the lack of planning can cause," says Mr. Dunning, of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Other agencies, such as the Energy Department, are much more protective of their supercomputing facilities, he says. "I don't think they think heavily about that" at NSF, he says. Asked about that comment, the NSF's Mr. Kim replies that he believes that the agency supports the supercomputer centers.
Supercomputer Shortage
Many researchers say they cannot get enough time on the NSF's supercomputers as it is.
"High-end computing resources are not readily accessible and available to researchers with the most demanding computing requirements," the President's Information Technology Committee said in April in a summary of a draft report expected to be released later this year.
Indeed, demand for supercomputing is on the rise. Computer models are becoming more realistic, which fuels interest by scholars in using them, says Mr. Dunning. New disciplines, like molecular biology and environmental modeling, are breaking into supercomputing, he says.
All supercomputer users are not equal. A relative handful could monopolize the existing machines doing research in such fields as cosmology and high-energy physics that require enormous computations, even by the standards of supercomputers. Many others, in disciplines such as political science and musicology, need more-limited amounts of supercomputer time, and there is not enough available time on the supercomputers to fully serve both groups.
The NSF supercomputer centers, at the foundation's behest, have often chosen to meet the needs of the small users, many researchers say. "They're trying to keep as many people happy as they can," says Calvin Ribbens, an associate professor of computer science in Virginia Tech's College of Engineering and deputy director of the institution's Terascale Computing Facility, which consists of 1,000 advanced Apple computers working in unison. But the centers' strategy effectively bars truly revolutionary research, which requires huge blocks of computing time, he says. "To get the Nobel Prize, you need to use the machine for a long time."
"If we had 10 times the amount of supercomputing power that we have today, there are problems that we could solve," says Ralph Roskies, scientific director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
Robert Sugar, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says he needs far more time, even though his team of theoretical physicists has been allotted "several million hours" of supercomputing time on NSF facilities this year. That allocation is smaller than it sounds, because each separate processor in the supercomputer counts against that time limit, so if 1,000 processors work on a project, the time limit will be reached in a few thousand hours.
High-end computing is "a generic intellectual amplifier," says Mr. Reed, the vice chancellor at Chapel Hill, meaning that it is useful in many different disciplines. But that flexibility has its own drawback: orphanhood during budget debates. "It's everybody's second priority but often not anybody's first priority," he says.
And it should be a top priority, says William A. Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering and a former NSF official. Supercomputing is not just an intellectual curiosity, he and others say. Rather, supercomputing is essential for America's industrial and academic competitiveness.
Even researchers who don't need supercomputers today have a stake in the debate, he says, because tomorrow's desktop computers and software will be influenced by today's decisions about research into supercomputing technology.
"Supercomputers are time machines," he says. "What you've bought when you've bought a supercomputer is being able to do something sooner rather than later." http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 51, Issue 37, Page A1 Copyright ) 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 24, 2005 | In
News
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Newsflash
Welcome! You are reading the eleventh issue of "The Hub," the newsletter that is published by, for, and about ITS. This special late edition has the most up-to-date information about progress on ITS Manning and some announcements of things you need to know.
The goal of this publication is to provide each other with timely information about the services and activities of our department and to support the ITS community, and we appreciate your support for our efforts. Submit your stories and announcements to
its_communications@unc.edu by 5 p.m. Friday, June 3rd, to be included in the June 7th issue.
May 24, 2005 | In
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Bulletin Board
Triangle/Triad Instructional Technology (Tri-IT) is an informal group open to anyone in the University who is interested in supporting the use of technology in teaching and learning. Formed over three years ago, Tri-IT's membership is made up of faculty and staff from several Triangle- and Triad-area universities, including UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, UNC-Greensboro, Duke, East Carolina, and Elon. Meetings are held twice a year at one of the member institutions. The Spring 2005 Tri-IT meeting was held this month at UNC-Greensboro. Handouts from the presentations at this meeting are available at
http://www.uncg.edu/tlc/Tri-IT/.
For more information about Tri-IT and future meetings, contact Kathy Thomas, ITS Center for Instructional Technology.
May 24, 2005 | In
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Bulletin Board
Kirsten Vollmer, an applications analyst programmer currently on a team creating an online application to correct insurance claims, is "going to jail for good"--a good cause, that is.
Kirsten is participating in the Muscular Dystrophy Association's Jail'n'Bail and hopes to raise $3,000 by June 15, when she'll be arrested and held at the Carolina Inn. Since we all bail each other out all the time anyway, check out the
Web site to rescue her, and help send 5 kids to summer camp besides.--LJB
