Although the development team has a design goal of supporting "private" workstations, it is a secondary goal at this time. This means the project is not initially being targeted at faculty desktops or power users within the administrative area. It also means that we are not initially targeting personally owned computers.
Although Pismere is expected to reduce the burden placed on local cluste r managers, the development is not focused on their needs. The benefits that they will obtain are a side effect of the central management of the environment. The initial deliverables of the project are not intended to provide cluster managers with a suite of tools that enable them to have fine-grained management of the machines in their cluster. The team feels that this would be a laudable goal but the technical difficulties in achieving this will prevent it from being done for the initial deployments. Another point to keep in mind is that Pismere is not intended to be the NT response to layered Athena. The deliverables of the project are not intended to be a boutique from which the user gets to select which packages he or she likes. To achieve this we would likely have to forsake the global namespace, and the central management of the machines.