Energy Efficient ICT
I learnt all sort of things last week at a workshop in Cardiff. The power consumption of various bits of an average server for instance.
Power supply unit - 38w
Fan - 10w
CPU - 80w
Memory - 36w
Disks - 12w
Slots - 50w
Motherboard - 25w
I learnt that you lose roughly 50% of the power that you pay for by the time that it gets to your server.
I learnt that they were cooling hot computer components with water back in the 1960’s, so any (entirely understandable) fears you might have about scary amounts of electricity mixing with water in your state-of-the-art data centre … relax.
And much else besides. The workshop was called ‘Sustainable IT in Universities and Colleges: Energy Efficient Configuration, Cooling and Power Supply in Data Centres.’
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2008/06/sustainableit.aspx
Funded by JISC, run by Peter James as part of the SusteIT initiative, and hosted by Hugh Beedie at Cardiff university, there were about 50 participants from a range of institutions and from a mix of IT and Estates departments, the coming-together of which would be a laudable outcome in its own right, never mind the content of the workshop!
There was a great to deal to consider, but one thing stood out very clearly from the presentations. The most sustainable, energy efficient, and ultimately the cheapest way of dealing with the storage and access of digital information is to do it at scale, with state of the art equipment, in Scotland.
Pardon? … yes, in Scotland apparently. The weather is colder in Scotland and if, as Mike Brown (University of Edinburgh) explained, you install a system where you can use the outside ambient temperature to take over from your chiller units when it gets cold enough to render inside air conditioning pointless, then the rather bracing Scottish climate could end up saving you a great heap of money. He has figures, and evidence … it’s all very plausible.
Neil Grindley
Digital Preservation Programme Manager
Research data curation
Back last year, following the Digital Curation Conference in Washington DC, JISC and the Andrew J Mellon Foundation hosted an international workshop to discuss and suggest where the international priorities are for research and development work supporting academic research data curation. It’s taken a while for the notes to become available, for which I apologise, but here they are:
Priorities for research data curation workshop 2007
(I realise this is a PDF file, which won’t please everyone, but shrunk the filesize by over an order of magnitude from MS Word)
The starting point for the workshop was a recognition that, while research data orients largely by (sub)discipline, the way in which infrastructure is developed and funded is often oriented nationally, or even around institutions. Some way is needed to square these two. I have to confess that, on the day, I wasn’t sure we’d made a lot of progress, but in drafting the notes I changed my mind somewhat. Certainly, Peter Murray-Rust seemed to identify the academic department infrastructure as a key point where intervention could serve both that department and the wider goal of data curation and sharing. The photos of flip chart diagrams are perhaps not easy to read or understand, but suggest a distinctive place for libraries and repositories.
Greg Crane’s Perseus project anticipated some of the topics that were covered later - notably how to design an infrastructure that is sustainable and yet adaptive - there are a few ideas in the notes. there are also a few ideas about how the problem space might be broken down so that an international approach can be taken, though this remains difficult. With luck and effort, JISC’s and other UK ‘data’ work will join up with that in the US (eg the NSF Datanet programme), Australia (Australian National Data Service), etc, and these notes will help us do that.
Many thanks to the workshop participants, listed at the end of the notes.
ReStore workshop
I attended a very interesting workshop for the ReStore project last week. The project is run by Southampton’s ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and is investigating the use of a repository to host and maintain orphan web resources.
The problem that the project is addressing is that very useful web resources are produced by research projects. However when the project funding stops the maintenance of the resources often stops. This means that the resources start to decay, broken links flourish and the usefulness of the resource deteriorates quickly.
ReStore aims to address this problem by accepting suitable resources after a review process and then hosting and curating the sites with a mixture of automated and manual processes.
The project is funded by ESRC and aims to produce a prototype repository that curates a few web resources that have been produced by other ESRC projects.
The workshop was chiefly concerned with introducing the project and discussing some of the major issues such as technical challenges, IPR and sustainability. The presentations from the day can be downloaded from the project website: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/restore/slides/. These include some mockups of the proposed system and an overview of the proposed review and curation process.
The project’s work on development of a long-term strategy for ESRC in sustaining on-line resources will be very relevant to JISC.
The technical challenges in hosting a range of resources that may all use different software and hardware are significant and it may be better in the short term to use Amazon Web Services or a similar service to host the sites and avoid a large hardware bill.
Repositories and Preservation Programme Synthesis
We are proposing to undertake a synthesis of the repositories and preservation programme which will support action. This means that the outputs need to be targeted at decision makers with additional information for those that will have to implement the decisions.
We have taken as a starting point the idea that decision makers are most likely to take note of what we are saying if repositories or preservation address problems that they are already worried about, and that many of these will stem from government, funding council or similar policies which they have to implement.
We have identified policies, decision makers who are concerned with them and ways in which we think that repositories or preservation can help.
We are aware that there will be other policies out there that we should be considering, that there may be other ways in which repositories or preservation could help and there may be other people we need to address.
We would very much welcome comments and thoughts on our thinking so that we can take it forward and start the synthesis.
Please comment either by posting comments or by email to Tom Franklin who is leading on this (tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk).
Research
The Research Excellence Framework is of concern to many at the moment including senior managers, research managers, researchers and librarians. We believe that it is likely that institutional repositories will make collection of the relevant information easier and cheaper and will support whatever metrics are likely to be selected. It is also possible that open access repositories will lead to research being found more easily and therefore cited more widely. This also supports increasing research recognition.
Funding mandates from funding bodies such as research councils and Wellcome can be addressed through the use of required repositories (such as UK Pubmed Central), but through the use of suitable institutional repositories that support things like embargo periods.
Community and business engagement requires that information is made accessible to those that might effective use of it. Institutional repositories may assist here.
Teaching and learning
Cost reduction may be achieved through better sharing of learning materials, including learning objects, this will be of interest to both managers and teachers who need to then implement and make use of repositories, but contributors will also have to think about using appropriate standards. Integration with the VLE would also enable the most current version of materials to be easily accessible.
Quality assurance of courses, especially franchised courses for instance between a university and FE colleges is of concern to senior managers and teachers and could be supported by making learning resources available across the group through use of repositories.
Many institutions and their managers are concerned with retaining control over the IPR of their learning materials, institutional repositories for learning objects offer one way of controlling access effectively.
Information services and libraries
All managers and Staff are concerned with meeting their legal and Contractual requirements including self-deposit / open access and being able to enforce embargoes. Institutional repositories can help with these issues.
Help wanted
Are these the most important drivers?
Are there other drivers that we should consider?
Have we correctly identified the key audiences who can help to identify these things?
Posted by: Tom Franklin
Is this an effective development community?
The information environment, and repositories in particular, were highlighted by Sir Ron Cooke (JISC chair), in his opening keynote at the JISC conference. (See the online conference proceedings.)
He described the vision of a national e-infrastructure supporting the “body of knowledge” at the centre. He told delegates that “[his] nightmare is the challenge of the super-abundance of digital data” and stressed the importance of positioning our repositories very carefully in this landscape of abundant information. From a seemingly different perspective, the closing keynote by Angela Beesley described the work of the Wikimedia foundation, which includes Wikipedia but also other interesting projects I had not heard of before. Their vision is of open access, of making as much knowledge as possible available to the world. Their solution is less about infrastructure and more about mass, scaleable workflows. Her answer to “can you trust user-generated content?” was a refreshingly firm “no. but you can trust the process”.
So how do we develop a layer of scholarly information (for research, learning and teaching) where individuals can find, use and share trusted information, supported by an agile infrastructure provided by institutions, publicly funded shared services, commercial services and wikipedia? It’s a heady mix. I took heed from Ron’s warning that “it’s often easier to have the vision than to have the stamina to battle against institutional inertia or even resistance”.
I think that’s the key challenge for us now, in the world of digital libraries and e-infrastructure. How do we ensure that we’re building firm foundations instead of castles in the sky? How do we avoid going down routes that are technically interesting but offer no tangible benefits to staff and students in institutions?
An important part of the answer is in how we, as a development community, work together to make sure we’re doing the right sorts of things in the right way in the right order. This was the focus of the Rapid Community Building session I went to in the afternoon . The Users and Innovation Development Model marries up the requirements analysis process with the development process to encourage constant sense-checking and quality assurance. We need this on a grand scale if we’re to continue developing in the right direction. The Emerge project is about sharing ideas to support this virtuous cycle and the overall impression I had was of creative chaos! Not everyone wants to work in the web2.0 way. But perhaps if every cluster of developers has an enthusiastic communicator then the community will get more of the benefits sooner.
I’ll finish with a quote and a question.
Quote, with thanks to George Roberts in the community building session:
“Much of what works is already there” Cooperrider and Srivastva (1987)
Question … Is it true? How do we review what works? How do we address the gaps? The IE team really wants to hear from projects how we can improve the development cycle, from identifying useful projects through to embedding outputs. What sorts of things can we all do to make this process work better?
Training for JISC project staff starting up and enhancing repositories
The Repositories and Preservation Programme contains a strand called start up and enhancement. This is our straight talking strand in that all the projects are either starting up a new repository or enhancing an established one.
One of the interesting things about this strand is that all the funding for projects was provided on a matched basis, i.e. JISC funded a maximum of 50% of the project costs. The idea behind this was that if the institution invested in the project then there was a greater chance of them continuing to invest in the resulting repository once the JISC funding had ceased, therefore leading to more sustainable outputs. However sustainability is not just about pumping money into technology, it is also about the people involved and their skills. The 44 projects in this strand contain a lot of project staff and the skills they develop during their projects will be invaluable in developing the repository infrastructure in the UK over the coming years. Therefore it is important that JISC do all they can to support project staff in developing their skills. One way we are addressing this issue is to fund a programme of training for the start up and enhancement project staff.
The project to provide this training is called SUETR (Start Up and Enhancement TRaining) and will be run by Maureen Pennock at UKOLN over the next year. The project will start with a training requirements gathering exercise which will assess what training is required and what is the most appropriate delivery method for that training. The SUETR project will work very closely with the Repositories Support Project and any online training materials such as podcasts, slides and notes will be distributed to the wider community via the Repositories Support Project website.
While this training programme is provided for project staff in the start up and enhancement strand, it is possible that there will be spare places at some of the training sessions. When this happens the spare places will be offered to the wider community so keep your eye on this blog and the JISC-repositories mailing list for announcement of any training opportunities.
If you want to know more about this training, please feel free to contact me.
Posted by: Andy McGregor