Phase 2 for the Admins

I entered my current position last June. Before me, it hadn’t existed for a year or so. That gap gave me a lot to do immediately as faculty supervisor of the sysadmins: upgrades, problem-solving, server migrations, deprecation of old hardware, etc., all on top of maintaining existing services. The admins spent a lot of time on those issues, to good effect.

Starting my second year in the role, I’m basically satisfied that we’ve finished that work. Maintenance and tracking will keep us up to speed for a while.

We’re now exploring options for how to make better use of the great resources we have. I see opportunities for growth in three areas:

  • Virtualization, containers, and other cloud-style features
  • High-performance computing (HPC) and specifically scientific computing, a longstanding strength of ours
  • Security

We’re working out the specifics as a group over the next few months, but I’m pretty excited about what we can accomplish at this point.