![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Brand New Day
Aug. 4th, 2008 10:26 amIts not a secret that I have been looking for other employment for a few weeks. However, last week my boss and grandboss, the Director of IT, were able to make sufficient changes in my "duties as assigned" that made me reconsider leaving.
So today is the first official day of my new assignment at Emory.
The assignment is the actual job that I was hired to do almost three years ago: focus on clustering technologies in the School of Public Health and work on getting the faculty and staff here using state of the art software and hardware to solve their computational problems.
I've been relieved of all of my generic system administration duties and only retain only those responsibilities that pertain to the cluster or other high performance computing topics.
I've been moved out of the office with the system administrators to drastically reduce the chances of me getting involved in system admin problems. This is because I have a strong tendency to intricate myself into problems that are discussed openly. If I'm not there to hear them, then I won't do that. And the other guys won't be tempted to tempt me either.
I've also had a few other duties added to my plate. They want me to act as a sort of "technology evangelist" and start selling the concept of using cluster computing to the rest of the departments and organizations on campus that are part of the Health Sciences. Emory University has a large cluster (1024 cores spread out over 256 computers) that is underutilized at the moment. And its going to be one of my tasks to match up the right users with those resources. Sounds like an interesting challenge. I'm sure I can get the low-hanging fruit of those that already want to use it but just haven't been shown the way. But to get the cluster REALLY utilized I'm going to have to reach the ones that are ignorant or are well set in their ways. Those are tough nuts to crack.
I'm looking forward to it but I'm still nervous. You know the story of the dog that chases cars all his life and is never successful. Then one day he actually catches the car. And doesn't have a clue what to do with it.
Well, I'm really hoping I am NOT that dog :-)
Wish me luck.
So today is the first official day of my new assignment at Emory.
The assignment is the actual job that I was hired to do almost three years ago: focus on clustering technologies in the School of Public Health and work on getting the faculty and staff here using state of the art software and hardware to solve their computational problems.
I've been relieved of all of my generic system administration duties and only retain only those responsibilities that pertain to the cluster or other high performance computing topics.
I've been moved out of the office with the system administrators to drastically reduce the chances of me getting involved in system admin problems. This is because I have a strong tendency to intricate myself into problems that are discussed openly. If I'm not there to hear them, then I won't do that. And the other guys won't be tempted to tempt me either.
I've also had a few other duties added to my plate. They want me to act as a sort of "technology evangelist" and start selling the concept of using cluster computing to the rest of the departments and organizations on campus that are part of the Health Sciences. Emory University has a large cluster (1024 cores spread out over 256 computers) that is underutilized at the moment. And its going to be one of my tasks to match up the right users with those resources. Sounds like an interesting challenge. I'm sure I can get the low-hanging fruit of those that already want to use it but just haven't been shown the way. But to get the cluster REALLY utilized I'm going to have to reach the ones that are ignorant or are well set in their ways. Those are tough nuts to crack.
I'm looking forward to it but I'm still nervous. You know the story of the dog that chases cars all his life and is never successful. Then one day he actually catches the car. And doesn't have a clue what to do with it.
Well, I'm really hoping I am NOT that dog :-)
Wish me luck.
