Institute of Technology
Minutes of the ITICC Meeting,
February 15, 2007
3:35 p.m., Physics 166
Present: Bryan Carlson (ADCS), Peter Hudleston (IT Dean’s Office), Phil Kachelmyer (ADCS), Satish Kumar (CEMS), Larry LeMay (ADCS), Dan MacEwan (Chem), Kent Mann (Chem), Kent Mein (CSE, IT Labs), Ray Muno (AEM/ME), Sean O’Neill (Astro), Tom Shield (AEM), Larry Storey (CEMS), Dale Swanson (ECE), Juan P. Trelles (ME), Ben VanderSluis (ME)
1) Status reports from CSciE and ADCS and PJH
Hudleston
announced that the proposal to acquire licenses for Mathematica and Matlab for
use on student computers had been approved by committee vote. He asked Kachelmyer to proceed with making
arrangements with the vendors. There was
some discussion about when the licenses would start. Should we wait until next semester? If we started at once would there be a
reduction in cost if the period of licensing were less than a year. Would the licensing be adjusted to coincide
with renewal times with current licenses held with these vendors? Kachelmyer said he would find out, and that
he was sure that we would not be paying more than the annual rate adjusted for
whatever period the license was for.
Hudleston said he was in favor of getting the licenses set up as soon as
possible and not waiting until the fall. He said he had not yet got the message
out to the other colleges inviting a buy in.
The rate he was offering was $3,000 per college. He hoped to cover half the cost of the
licenses in this way.
Carlson said
that he thought the problem with the corrupted profiles had been identified, or
at least localized. It was associated with the newest version of Symantec
Antivirus. The company was aware of the
problem and had said that they believed it had been fixed. The number of corrupted profiles had been
running at 30-40 a day.
2) Public Lab Improvements, Spring Round – Initial Presentation of
Proposal
In
MacDonald’s absence Mein handed out the list and described briefly the
proposal. The main items were computers
to replace those reaching their 4-year life span in EECS 3-170, ME 308, E 314
and Lind Hall 24, 127 in all. The cost
of the 40 machines in Lind 24 will be spilt evenly between upper division and
lower division, since this lab is used in part as a computer classroom and part
as a general lab.
The 3-ft
tables in ME 302 are to be replaced by larger ones to improve the
workspace. This is possible now because
this room is no longer used much as a classroom. There will also be shelves installed under
the tables to hold the computers.
A
replacement laptop is needed for Carlson to run Ghost multi-cast sessions in
labs that are not on a local subnet.
The final
item is additional disk space to increase the student disk storage quota. Mein said he thought
the current space was 60-70% full, and that this was about the limit for
storing and retrieval of data without loss of performance. The increased amount
is yet to be determined. Shield pointed
out that the big cost is tape for backup and storage, not disk space.
3) Other
Business
Shield inquired about the
funds from the dean’s office that go to support instructional computing. Hudleston said that they had decreased from
the original $500K to $400K, but that the funds available were sufficient for
maintaining the labs properly. He
pointed out that instructional equipment funds to departments had been cut
also, and that there was no guarantee that further cuts would not occur, given
the pressure of the college budgets.