To: cease@MIT.EDU Cc: ganderso@MIT.EDU Subject: Notes from our 10/15/99 meeting Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 09:29:51 -0400 From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" Attending were Bob Basch, Abby, Bill, and Naomi Agenda ------ - faculty responses to Naomi's questionnaire - 3partysw license logs - news from SGI - other data - renewal scenarios over the next few years 1. Faculty responses Naomi sent out a questionnaire to 30 faculty/TAs/administrators asking about course use of SGI's and anticipated effects of our phasing out of this platform in the public clusters. Replies have been received from about 1/3 of them. Chemical Engineering and 6.035 (compiler course) seem the most upset about the prospect of losing SGI's in the clusters. Naomi will summarize the responses for next week's meeting. 2. Abby presented 3partysw logs from license servers. MSI didn't seem to get that much use by undergraduates in Sept. We'll check again at the end of Oct. 3. Bill reported that MSI reports their future direction to be a client application that talks to an application server. We probably willneed to address the MSI problem to support those departments that depend heavily on it in any case, as the company moves away from the MIPS client platform over the next few years. Re news from SGI, the 4 GB O2 doesn't exist anymore and they're now shipping 9 GB machines. We will be getting a loaner to try it out. Source code that we received from SGI doesn't contain any of the X stuff, and that poses problems for us. Bill has not received a reply re SGI's long term strategy from Eileen. He also sent off that question to *** Brown. It appears that the follow-on to the O2 will be their Intel LInux desktop machine. W/in the next 12 to 18 months, they will have a 400 MHz machine in the R5000 series. IRIX will become the platform for their application servers - they're staying with MIPS for their high end machines. Questions that we need to answer in reaching our recommendations: - Is there value to buying some/more/less/any SGI's in FY2001? - What are the pros and cons of reducing the total number of SGI's in clusters? for Cluster Group? for OLC? for Ops? for Dev? for Depts? We know that over a 4 year timeframe, the IRIX single user desktop will disappear. In FY2002 - 2003, SGI is not going to want to sell us O2s. What do we do in FY2001 is the big question. Our next meeting will be Friday, Oct 22. Naomi will bring information re faculty responses to the questionnaire.