7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 9:45am Consolidating Campus Research Computing: Of Growing Pains and Scale
Speaker: Dr. James Cuff, Chief Technology Officer, Cycle Computing (former Director of Research Computing & Chief Technology Architect, Harvard University) 

Over the last 6 years the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard has taken a coordinated approach to consolidation and improvement of research computing assets. Growing from 200 processors scattered throughout closets on campus with 30TB of departmental storage to over 20,000 processors and 7PB has resulted in significant challenges. Data center space, power and cooling being but one, but also how to coordinate access to shared processors on systems in over six to seven diverse areas throughout campus. The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) has enabled Research Computing to grow and sustain increased capability for their researchers. During this presentation James will cover the reasons for the underlying data center challenges, enormous data rate issues, diversity of computing requests, and support challenges while also managing storage and CPU scaling for the lowest possible cost.

9:45am – 10:00am Break

10:00am - 10:45am GIS Support for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Speaker: Patrick Florance, Manager of Geospatial Technology Services, Tufts University

Over the past ten years, the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within the humanities and social sciences has been growing rapidly. Methods to support geospatial data, computing, consultation, and instructional needs will be presented.

10:45am – 12:00pm Group Activities
Following a 15-min introduction with instructions and Q&A, four groups led by the three speakers and the panel moderator will spend 40 mins discussing a topic of their choice with the goal of delivering a 5-min oral report to the full audience during the final 20-min reporting session. Anticipated group topics include Research Data management, Research Data storage, HPC and Research Software, Support for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Support for Research in the Life Sciences. Ahead of the event, a survey will be conducted to give the audience an opportunity to help choose the group topics to be discussed.

12:00pm – 1:00pm Lunch

1:00pm – 1:45pm Research IT Trends & Tips
Speaker: Chris Dagdigian, Founding Partner and Director of Technology, BioTeam

"Drawing on his popular "HPC Trends from the Trenches" talks, Chris will discuss real world research IT trends and best practices as seen through BioTeam's work with many different pharmaceutical, biotech, academic, research and government clients. The talk will be focused on providing blunt practical advice and tips without marketing-speak or unnecessary hype"
 

1:45pm – 3:00pm Panel Discussion: What set of IT services should be provided to faculty in support of their research? In-house or Outsourced?

Our 3 speakers James Cuff, Chris Dagdigian and Patrick Florance and our moderator and host Lionel Zupan will discuss with participation from the audience what set of IT services should be provided to faculty in support of their research and if these services should be provisioned in-house or outsourced.

3:00pm End