Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
ON SCHEDULE Athena to Be Transformed By Robert C. Di Iorio News Office Project Athena, the unique and successful eight-year effort in academic computing that has become an integral part of education and research at MIT, will conclude its experimental phase in June, as scheduled. The campus-wide Athena computing environment of some 800 public and departmental workstations will become a permanent part of the Institute's academic infrastructure. Athena's research initiatives and new efforts in educational computing will be pursued through a new research activity MIT is forming. Those were among the developments cited at the February 20 faculty meeting by President Charles M. Vest and Provost Mark S. Wrighton as they reported on the Athena transformation. Launched in May of 1983, with strong financial and staff support from Digital Equipment Co. and IBM, Project Athena has inspired similar efforts on other campuses across the United States. Project Athena was a $100 million effort, including funds raised by the Institute. At MIT, the goal was to integrate the graphical and computational power of the computer into the teaching of every subject offered at the Institute. Today, President Vest and Professor Wrighton said in a report to the faculty meeting, Athena has become "an integral part of our educational and research enterprise and is an essential part of many subjects." During the 1990 fall term, they said, 3,500 different users accessed Athena each day. Nearly all of MIT's 4,389 undergraduates, two-thirds of its 5,239 graduate students and one-third of its 941 faculty members are regular users of Athena. About 10 percent of subjects MIT offers directly use Athena and many other subjects benefit by using the system for word processing, data analysis and electronic communications. Professor Wrighton, on behalf of MIT, thanked Professor Gerald L. Wilson, who was dean of the School of Engineering when Athena was formed in 1983, "for his considerable efforts to start this and to nurture it over these years." The provost also complimented Professor Steven R. Lerman, Athena's first director, and Professor Earll M. Murman, its current director, for their work. Beyond these key individuals, Professor Wrighton said, Athena's success was the result of significant efforts by a large number of faculty, "a very significant effort from students and a very significant effort from a large number of people on the Athena staff. "We also owe a lot to our partners in this project, Digital Equipment Co. and IBM. They have contributed significantly in financial terms and have been very major players in terms of their staff. The companies have put a lot of time into this and I'm sure they would say that they realized some significant gain from it." Athena's lasting impact on the MIT campus has inspired efforts elsewhere. "Athena is also highly regarded outside MIT," President Vest and Professor Wrighton said. "The Athena client-server architecture represents a new model of computation that rivals the introduction of time sharing of a generation ago. Athena's technical contributions, such as X-windows and Kerberos authentication software, have established worldwide standards. DEC, IBM and other vendors have incorporated the technology of Athena into their products now being installed on other campuses across the United States." The new look for academic computing at MIT as Athena draws to a close is in accord with the recommendations of the Committee on Academic Computation for the 1990s and Beyond (CAC 90), chaired by Professor Margaret L.A. MacVicar, the dean for undergraduate education, Professor Wrighton said. Professor MacVicar said that the committee concluded: "that Athena had done exactly what was hoped for--it had planted MIT's feet firmly in academic computation; that there had been some curricular successes, there had been the proper number of failures and mistakes for an experiment; that you learn and go forward; that there had been extraordinary technical successes, especially authentication systems and X-Windows. "We found that Athena was perhaps better appreciated externally than internally. We realized that within MIT itself it was not pervasively participated in, in part because it had been intolerant of DOS-based machines and Macintoshes. . ." The CAC 90 committee recommended that MIT assume the task of service delivery for academic computing, establish a follow-on research effort and move away from Unix, Athena's single computer platform, to "something that would tolerate DOS machines, Macintoshes, as well as UNIX machines. We want to see something opaque to the operating system under it. . .," Professor MacVicar said. Professor James D. Bruce, vice president for Information Systems, told the faculty that the goal as responsibility for the Athena network is shifted to his organization "is for users of the Athena Computing Environment to see no degradation in service. . ." Other goals, he said, are to provide a continued focus for academic computing and to extend the Athena Computing Environment to other platforms and, continuing the work done in Athena, "to provide a basic set of services and tools across the common platforms at the Institute." The conclusion of the Project Athena experiment and the transfer of many of its functions into existing Institute organizations has resulted in the elimination of some 18 Athena positions. Lay-off notices were delivered to the affected individuals late last week. MIT's Personnel Department is working with the affected employees as they seek new positions here or relocate, Professor Bruce said. Addressing the budget implications of the Athena transformation, Professor Bruce said that in the present year "we are spending roughly $9 million for Athena's operation. Of that, $2.4 million comes from MIT budget, the rest comes from DEC and IBM and other sponsors." The fiscal 1992 budget to operate the central public clusters and servers involved with Athena is $3.7 million, he said. Professor Bruce also outlined the organization within Information Systems of a group to support faculty who want to use the Athena Computing Environment in their teaching. Other groups will support desk top computing users across a wide variety of platforms, he said. Professor Wrighton announced that he has named Professor Lerman to lead a major effort to maintain MIT's leadership position in academic computing. "We've reached a high level of achievement and the question now is what can we do next that leads to a higher plateau. "I have decided to call on Steve Lerman to lead this new initiative and plan to provide him with a starter grant. He will be working with some of the people who are in a research mode in Athena to develop some new initiatives and hopefully by January of 1992 these will be fully up and running, and fully self sustaining in terms of support not unlike that we've had from DEC and IBM. We expect that a number of initiatives, not a single megaproject, will emerge from this. "We are looking forward to an exciting period. It is not going to be easy. We hope to sharpen some bare-bones proposals that exist now and submit them to private and federal sources and see where we come out in the next six to eight months."