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The CIO’s Perfect Storm
6/22/2006
If that happens, campuses and institutions may react in an almost free-market manner. For example, the research organizations, dissatisfied that their central IT organizations are overly focused on administrative issues and not paying attention to IT enablement of research, may set up their own separate research IT area focused purely on their needs. And that fracturing will cause more resources to be spent overall. Then, if one particular part of the community makes the case for managing its own IT, the institution will put resources there—because it will fear that putting additional resources into the central IT organization will result in those resources getting sucked up into perfect storm issues and the research need will not be met.
Would I be right to guess that part of the risk, with this potential fracturing, is losing opportunities for collaboration and resource sharing? Yes—for collaboration and leveraging, too: Many of the vendors that sell research computation gear also sell desktop equipment and administrative platforms. You don’t want to lose the ability to take advantage of synergies. For instance, we are growing our storage at LSU, primarily related to our planned expansion of highperformance computing cycles. But at the same time, we need more storage for our university information systems. So, we were able to put these things together and make decisions that would allow us to take care of both needs with a more efficient investment of money than if we did them separately. I fear that with fracturing in this environment, that synergy will be lost.
What are some examples of other areas, specifically at LSU, where you’d like to focus your efforts as a CIO? One of the things we’re very focused on, because of the presence of Ed Seidel and the Center for Computation and Technology at LSU, is high-performance and grid computing to enable the advancement of science. And the LONI project—the Louisiana Optical Networking Initiative—g'es beyond what we’re doing on our own campus. In addition to buying the fiber pathways, optical gear, and network switches to bring up LONI as a regional network, we’ve also purchased highperformance computing resources to distribute to state institutions so that we can use LONI to form a computational grid.
LSU is also a member of SURA, the Southeastern Universities Research Association. SURA has a project called the SURAgrid that allows member institutions to put computational assets or resources into a broader grid across the SURA community.
Both LONI and the SURAgrid are initiatives that help advance the collaborative nature of 21st-century science, and show how building IT infrastructure can really enable scientific advances that go beyond the borders of an individual lab or campus. And that fits well with our role in the national infrastructure, in terms of our involvement with national high-performance networks such as National LambdaRail.
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