Grad Council Meeting:
Location and Time
The following members were present
Issues discussed
Background: Last year, the grad council was granted an amount of $15,000 to buy computing resources for graduate students. The grad council met a few times to decide on how to spend the amount and after evaluating all the options, decided to allocate $2000 to upgrade the CSGrad server, $6000 to purchase new network storage for the gradlab machines, and $7000 to upgrad machines in McBryde 565. The grad council recommended some machine configurations and the CRC purchased the machines (7 Dell PCs). We need to allocate these machines to the people in 565 and decide on a policy for doing so.
There are a total of 18 computers in 565, and almost all are due for an
upgrade. There are 5 Pentium 233 MHz machines and 10 P2 400s, plus
two Athlon 1GHz machines that are fairly up to date (The same as those in the
gradlabs). One person is using his personal machine.
Sourabh spoke to the admins during the last week and asked if they could supply
us with more machines apart from the 7 Dells that we have just
purchased; they said that they could give us three more Athlon 1GHz machines.
They have several P2 400s with 384 MB RAM that are not being used. They added
that they could take RAM off these machines to upgrade the ones already there
in 565. I also met as many residents as possible in McB 565 to get their
current machine configurations and their needs.
We decided to replace the machines based on the machines available to each
graduate student and his or her academic status.
1. There are 5 Pentium 233 Machines and incidentally all of them are assigned
to PhD students. We decided to replace them with 5 new Dells.
2. There are 2 Athlon 1 GHz machines already in 565 which do not need to be
changed. We will be asking the administrators to upgrade them with more RAM.
3. There are 2 residents who are graduating in summer; we decided not to
replace the machines, but to upgrade them with as much RAM as possible.
4. One of the residents is using his own computer and does not want a new one.
We will be assigning him a P2 400 with 384 MB RAM which the admins
have, so that the person who will be using the research space after him can
make use of it.
5. One peson runs Linux on a P2 400 machine. We decided to leave it alone and
just upgrade the RAM.
6. One resident does not find a new machine necessary. So, the RAM will be
upgraded.
7. We have identified one resident who is using her research space as a backup
to the space she has somewhere else, we need to check if her
research space allocation should be continued for the next year. As of now, we
are just upgrading the machine she is using with more RAM.
How much RAM each machine gets during the upgrade will be dependent on the
amount of RAM the admins have for us to use.
That leaves us with 2 Dells and 3 Athlon 1GHz machines for 5 residents, all PhD
students. We have decided on having a draw to allocate the machines as none of
the above mentioned 5 residents have a special need for processing power, and
all the machines all have a good configuration.
So as to free up the resources for people who need them, we decided to change the policy of asking the applicants to fill an application form for the research space to asking them to request that their advisor send us an email saying that they need a research space because of shortage of resources in the research labs.