1. Background
The Athena desktop computing environment currently runs on over 300 IS&T owned systems in general use clusters around campus and over 600 other systems owned by departments, labs, centers and individuals. Initially put into production use in 1990 as the sole Institute Academic Computing platform, the Athena desktop continues to be actively used as one platform among many, and to be actively supported by IS&T as a service offering.
Over the years, evolutionary changes have been made to the Athena desktop computing environment. Athena 10 is the next evolutionary stage of Athena Linux.
2. Findings
- Utilize Upstream Provider
Athena should rely on upstream providers for operating system and application updates as much as possible. Similar to the update process used on Windows and Mac OS X, this will allow MIT to focus on configurations and applications that are unique to the Institute. In order to respect blackout periods, updates for cluster machines should be mirrored locally, giving us control of when they are deployed.
- Cluster Installation and Update Process
There are existing methods for installing and updating cluster machines that could decrease deployment time while minimizing network impact. These options should be reviewed to determine which could be used to deploy Athena in computing clusters. Some options mentioned in TAP discussion were Ghost and VMware.
- 3rd Party Applications
The Athena 10 team has not yet done due diligence to determine that Ubuntu will support all third party applications that are needed by the current Athena user community.
- Metrics
Current metrics gathered and presented about the Athena environment (numbers of users per system, cluster usage, demographics, etc) are insufficient for appropriate capacity planning and management of Athena Clusters as well as understanding who uses Athena around the Institute. The Athena Project team should consider ways of improving and better presentation of metrics.
3. Recommendation from the TAP Consultation
"Approved with Concerns":
A majority of TAP approves the plan as long as it takes into account the concerns described in the Findings.