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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 01 August 2008 10:18 |
With the confluence of a number of factors, we are pleased to inform you that we are disbanding the Research Computing Facility and its associated recharge center charging model and creating in its place The Facility.
Background: as Im sure all of you are aware, the whole RCF model has been under great pressure from changes in how we are computing. Long gone are the days of time shared services and large complex individual workstations, and we have moved into a more commodity-based computing environment using the ubiquitous PC or Mac. In addition, the number of users of our facility has decreased through the migration of undergraduate computing to the CADE and SCI and Flux having their own facility.
An even larger issue with the RCF model is the overhead that is required to keep it going. Each member of our facility team spends an average of about 5 hours per week dealing with the overhead of running the RCF. In addition, we have about 60% of one staff position time which is strictly devoted to billing and handling the facility books. When this is added up, it means that for the money that you are paying into the facility, you are receiving only about a 40% return in actual services. That is not a very good return on your hard earned grant money.
If we eliminated the RCF and the overhead that it costs means that we should be able to keep the facility running without hiring a replacement for newly lost facility members. We are in the process of making arrangements for the current billing staff, so it will be a real dollar gain by eliminating the RCF.
The net effect of this is that the facility will be wholly supported by the department through returned overhead (we will keep as much of the facility on the state budget as we can in order to save the cost of benefits). For those of you with grants, you will no longer be billed RCF charges (as of July 1). We know that you will put those funds to good use, hopefully picking up a few more graduate students so you can get even more great work done. Maybe you will even consider offering RA-ships to some of our brand new students.
RuSpace.ru - Russian Social Network When you write a future grant, you will no longer put in a computing charge line.
Computers that were designated RCF or non-RCF will lose that distinction. If you need students to have access to your computers, then they can have it. If you have colleagues visiting you who need access to your computers, then they can have it. We hope that this will reduce all that overhead on your time that the RCF caused you.
One of the reasons that we can do this is because we have moved undergraduate computing to the CADE. It is possible that now that we have such a small staff that other changes may have to be made. As we work through this process, we will keep everyone informed.
Thanks.
Bob Kessler |
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 13 August 2008 03:34 |
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Written by Todd Green
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Friday, 25 July 2008 08:57 |
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This is a reminder that this Saturday, July 26th, 2008, the entire MEB will be without power from 06:00 to 10:00 in the morning. This will affect the machine room, so all computing services, from Web to Email will be down. Services will be shutdown at 05:30. |
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Last Updated on Friday, 25 July 2008 09:01 |
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Written by Todd Green
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Thursday, 05 June 2008 07:22 |
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At 5:15pm this Friday, OIT will make a configuration change to the engineering routers to make sure that campus routing cannot be affected by edge routers. There is not expected to be any downtime for this, so this is just a heads up. |
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