Now we'll welcome our next speaker to the stage, Sharon PIT share and has served as the Vice President Information Technologies and Chief Information Officer at the University of Delaware. In this role, Sharon's charged with developing strategic IT initiatives that for the university's mission, she oversees information technology and support of teaching, learning, and research in the student experience at the university. Sharon dramatically expanded network connectivity at George Mason University, Birmingham University, and University of Delaware, leading all those institutions to a 100 gigabit capabilities, the Research and Education Network space. She served on advisory committees of Mc nc in North Carolina and on the boards of Moriah in the Commonwealth of Virginia and New York cern it, the New York State Education and Research Network, as well as Eastern Regional Network. Sharing has served on advisory governments and or strategy groups for Blackboard Inc, ie, learn, ENI cooperative, the IBM Cloud Academy, internet too, New York, cern it and Sunni. She's served as chair of the of the Teaching and Learning Technology collaborative of the North Carolina University system. As co-chair of the Higher Education Information Security Council at Educause. And as a member of the edgy calls Diversity, equity and Inclusion Task Force. Sharon's currently Vice Chair of the edgy calls board of directors. Sharon serve as faculty mentor of the New York CIO leadership academy, as well as mental mentor for the Leading Change Institute of Educause and CIO, C LIR, the leadership loud of vanished corporation and the senior leadership roundtable and the hawk and leadership round table of Educause. So we're going to welcome Sharon Pitt, who's going to tell us more about advancing research computing. Thanks everyone and I want to welcome everyone who's here in person and participating virtually. We're going to talk a little bit about advancing research from an information technology perspective today. And I'll say that while we are driven by science, we also recognize that a robust infrastructure is required to support data science and high-performance computing. I need to flip the slides myself. We're going to talk about multiple such success factors. I'm not going to go through each and everyone in advance, but we'll just cover it as we're going through. I'm just going to correct a little bit because it's Binghamton University in New York that we did that. I was able to bring a 100 gigabit per second and networking married. I've not gone any further South and the North Carolina's when I was hired to be CIO here at at UD, I noted that we only had a 10 gig connectivity to the Internet and services through magpies. So I asked even before I arrived, the interim CEO and now Deputy CEO, I JSON cash to apply for a CC started out because I knew I wouldn't get here in time to do it. And the acquisition of that grant has been the foundation of how it is that we have moved forward in our support of research at UD. We now connect to Philadelphia via peering services to NYSE or not. The New York State Education and Research Network. Delaware currently doesn't have its own run, but more to come. This provides a 100 gigabit per second connectivity to Internet and cloud service providers via a massive data center or co-location facility. And the 32 avenue of the Americas in New York City. Recently ties or not, has also extended as southerly route to Ashburn, Virginia to another massive colo facility becomes very important to us from a research perspective because of the peering surfaces. Also. And very recently our own work at UD with the Maryland Department of Information Technology. We will establish a additional 100 gigabit peering redundancy capability with mice or not, that will ensure that our research is not disrupted. It also provides us with some capability to connect with members of quilt is our Research and Education Networks across the United States who help us connect to researchers that we may be working with across the nation. Beyond UD, connectivity is becoming increasingly important. Through the pandemic, we had an educational response to students who are really in crisis in terms of their ability to participate in an educational perspective because they couldn't necessarily download capability. So we actually worked with the K through 12 space across Delaware and public libraries across Delaware to extend our edge Jerome capabilities so that we can provide drive up and walk up access for students across the state of Delaware at this actually helped because there are so many students and universities are engaged in at around for many to be able to access those services. That can be a foundation for how it is that we do more research education, and application in terms of broader outreach with our research activities. We also currently as University of Delaware provide, I'm going to call this low speed connectivity to museums and other Delaware entities. Names that you know like the Moors on Hadley and when tutor. And this could end up being the foundation for how it is that we begin doing the first Delaware Research and Education Network that would allow even more collaboration across the state, more high-speed connectivity, more opportunities for research to happen in our state. Why is that important? It limits downtime. It allows more effective computational run an analysis. And it allows researchers to leverage Cloud services. As you know, we're talking about high-performance computing at AUD in part because of Darwin, but that's a bit beyond University of Delaware. We have also made investments in on-premises high-performance computing with our Farber cluster or cabinets cluster are currently planning our third expansion, expansion of Communist guy. And we've been making strides, no pun intended. And our cloud arena, both in terms of participating in the Internet to class surfaces where our staff is learning about how it is that we can take advantage of Cloud capabilities for research, as well as taking advantage of the capabilities of Amazon Web Services, Azure, or the Google Compute Cloud platform with Cloud services that could be utilized by various research entities. The work on a lot of these projects has helped provide AI use cases for nicer and adds national research class form engagement with the research and education community at the national level. And we actually have for faculty, research faculty IUD, who are engaged in a using the national research platform. And I would say that those efforts, and I'll say that right now It was yesterday and today we've actually received two nodes from NRP that we're currently installing. And our data center at UD, which is going to be able to help us expand an international research even further. Today, of course, we're celebrating Darwin Day and high-performance computing beyond UD, with a UTI being a provider of some of that capability. We're we're thrilled to see the rest of the day what will be going on with, with Darwin. But first, I'll say it's the first high-performance computing system available to all of the University of Delaware in the Delaware Community Based on proposals as opposed to a purchase by him. Also say, I think that an important component of this is that UD is an exceed level to provider. Another component of success are considered to be research storage. We haven't made great strides in this area, but we understand that it is a gap. We understand from a university perspective that it is a gap. And we're making progress in pockets in an area that is for opportunity and growth. We're very pleased for the National Institute, NIH, for helping us to get a storage system that's going to be helping the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. And we hope to be able to leverage that kind of capability for other research storage that we need to be able to provide at University of Delaware. I know it's kind of weird to talk about data centers because they're infested and the cloud. And we're thinking about the cloud is as bursting capability as really a future avenue of how it is that we effectively do high-performance computing. But datacenters are still quite important. We started in 1977 and with a grant from the unit all Foundation and creating our data center here at University of Delaware. And of course, it's use has dramatically changed over the years. But for the foreseeable future, particularly for much of the HPC that we do, we're going to have to remain invested in data centers. And while we at the same time think about how it is that we can take advantage of new capabilities. I think this is an interesting slide we've been looking at our daily utilization. This is from 2010 to what we anticipate will happen in 2030. We, we, in some ways how the red and here is a cautionary tale because research HPC as much physically hotter activity than administrative systems, so cooling become something that's critically important. As we think about how it is that we support high-performance computing. So you'll see over the course of two decades that we're really looking at a flip from using administrative systems and our data center and supporting research computing and our data centers. As I mentioned, those create significantly more heat put the university is on top of this. We're actually working with facilities on launching a project this month to understand how it is that we address either from a cooling perspective are completely different perspective how it is that we provide an appropriate high tier level data center for a high-performance computing add. Your day. None of this would have been impossible at the University of Delaware or across the region without support from our community are granting organizations. Thank you. National Science Foundation, NIH, and others. Without the support of these granting agencies are collaborators in the higher education, are other non-profit entities and our Research and Education Networks. These are the grants that have been acquired. Some of them are University of Delaware grants and some of them are grants that University of Delaware participates in with other groups like Yale with the careers program and let out a Rutgers, the eastern regional network. Another success factor and our National Science Foundation and gas spoke to this a bit as well as the importance of people and thus process our team. As you can see that we're kind of at the bottom in terms of our research, cyber infrastructure, dedicated staff as compared to other entities, hover. The university has recognized the importance of people in the supported this process. People on the supportive infrastructure people and that's supportive faculty so that faculty can concentrate on research. Not how it is that they develop code or create Docs or whatever it happens to be. We are happy to announce that we are expanding that team of five to a team of eight on. We are hopeful that we are going to be able to acquire and find those staff. If you have any thoughts about who would be great in any of those roles as they begin to advertise, please contact John Huffman, who is our director of research, cyberinfrastructure for your thoughts. I'll also say this doesn't happen just with their research cyber infrastructure team on the UD information technology team. But there are many adjacencies with IT professionals across the institution, as well as our Enterprise Architect built Cotton, who is here. Thank you bow. And folks from our security teams and our cloud services team to ensure that this kind of work is successful. I also very much appreciated the discussion about training and workforce development. It, it's hard to find people with expertise in this kind of support. And we need to be developing those kinds of skills. We also need to be developing a diversity equity and inclusion approach to how it is that we incorporate a more diverse group and to how it is that we support research and all of us are a part of that effort that is essential to creating a robust and thriving research and education community. It starts with every person. And I would encourage you to try to figure out an active way that you might bring a junior faculty member, that you might encourage someone to be a part of this profession so that we can expand our community. I cannot stand at any meeting as a Chief Information Officer and not talk about security and compliance. It's sort of a requirement for the role. We have continued work that we need to do in this area. We have ongoing collaborations with the office research here at UT and Cornell ever be who is our Compliance Officer? We've made notable progress on our HIPAA compliance efforts. We've made investments in that and we are of course, at the audio I'm at the University of Delaware in the that also houses our College of Health Science and some of our clinics. So that's been an important investment for us. I'm very excited to say that we are re-purposing one of our research positions to embrace research security. This includes the cybersecurity material, the model certification, or what you're hearing about the CMD MC, that's as much progress has been made, but I think it's exciting that we're going to dedicate some support to that. Mike Ohio who's going to be taking on that role has, is here today and as a trusted CA fellow. So we're very excited for what it is that you're going to be doing for us in the future. And as I mentioned, there's plenty opportunity for continued progress in multiple areas on security and compliance is monomer. We need to do this as well. So those are all the success factors that I believe are important in terms of how it is that we create a sustain and created thriving research and education community. I want to thank you for your time and open it up for questions. And I believe there's a microphone going around. And for those of you who are on Zoom, we are collecting those questions via chat as well. Well, it sounds like we were completely thorough discussion of infrastructure. Thanks again for joining us. Have a wonderful day. I'm so excited to see the research that's happening as a result of those Darwin investment. I'll tell you a little story though. I don't know if you know this, you know, how difficult it was to acquire infrastructure during this time, global supply chains were really difficult. We weren't allowed to have people on campus to deliver equipment. Literally, on the first day that we were allowed to have visitors to campus. Is this correct, John, you and Bill showed up with Penguin at the loading dock to bring Darwin into the data center on the absolute first day that it was possible to do so. So I think that's an interesting story of a pandemic that we were so anxious to make sure that we had this capability that literally on the first day that university to Delaware opened its doors to delivery, that the Darwin system was one of the pieces. Lot was delivered. Again. Thank you.
DARWIN Computing Symposium_Advancing Research Computing at UD_Sharon Pitt.mp4
From Robert Diiorio March 28, 2022
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