IT @ CIS: A State of Constant Change
As the unofficial tour guide for the department, I am often taking groups of students, prospective students, parents, visitors and other members of the UAB community on tours of our department's various IT resources. Recently, I was asked how long we've had our Olympus cluster. “We installed it in January 2006,” I began. Then, as I thought about it some more, I remarked “Now that I think about it, everything you will see on this tour is new since I've been here.”
Considering I've only been in the department for about three years, that's a pretty remarkable statement. And it applies not just to the typical tour highlights, but to just about ALL of our department IT. I can only think of a few instances where equipment has been here longer than I have.
Since November of 2003, we've installed three clusters (170 servers in total), a visualization wall, 14 new rackmount servers, an automated tape backup library and a 30-ton air conditioning unit to cool it all. We've established four new research labs (CCL, KDDM, Undergrad Honors and Network Security) and invested over $50,000 in their startup IT. Every one of our four teaching labs has received new machines (over 90 workstation upgrades). We purchased a mobile videoconferencing cart and mounted a plasma display screen in our lobby. 21 stations in the undergraduate open lab have been upgraded, and the graduate lab is two weeks away from its own upgrade. Each one of our research labs has received new PCs in the past three years. PhD students have been furnished with new workstations, and nearly every faculty and staff member has been upgraded in that time as well. From projectors to laptops to printers to storage arrays to uninterruptible power supplies, the list goes on and on.
As a department, we are committed to investing the resources necessary to stay on the leading edge of the technology curve, and give our students access to the the latest and greatest computing resources. Access to technologies such as the Linux operating system, virtualization environments, forensic analysis software, HPC clusters, and multicore processors gives our students a competitive advantage as they graduate from the program and enter the work force.
I should also point out that many of these upgrades are a direct result of our students, through the use of the technology fees which they have paid as part of their tuition. As just a few examples, the equipment in our teaching labs (CH430, CH396 and CH145), the undergraduate open lab and the Undergraduate Honors Research Lab was all purchased this way. We feel it is important to invest that funding into equipment that will be used every day by the same students which funded it, and in places where it will have a broad impact across the entire student body.
The trend continues this year as we are gearing up for another round of upgrades. In the coming months, you'll see the deployment of new machines into CH430 and CH145, a major network upgrade providing Gigabit networking speeds across the department network, and innovative new A/V technologies in our teaching labs such as interactive pen displays and document imaging cameras. And before we know it, the cycle will begin again for next year. At CIS, the only thing constant about the IT is change.