Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 09:37:42 -0500
From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" 


Hello -

This past October I wrote to a number of our academic customers
that we were re-examining our strategy regarding the future of
Silicon Graphics workstations in the Athena Computing Environment,
and requested some information from you regarding your use of this
platform in your teaching.  A group of IS staff have looked at the
question of continued support for SGI machines as Athena
workstations from a number of aspects, and have come up with a set
of recommendations, which I've summarized below.  If you are
interested in more detail, including our analysis and reasons
behind this decision, I encourage you to look at the entire
report, at http://web.mit.edu/cease/www/report.html .

The recommendations that the team has made and that have been
accepted by the Director of Academic Computing include:

1.  Gradually phase out Athena-SGI support by the summer of 2003. 
Note that this coincides with SGI's announced end-date for active
(as opposed to maintenance) support of the IRIX operating system
and MIPS-based hardware, as well as the end of the normal 4-year
life-cycle for machines placed in clusters during the summer of
1999.  

2.  Do NOT reduce the number of SGIs in the public environment
during the 2000-2001 academic year.  Thus, there will be no fewer
SGI machines in the clusters or classrooms than there are today
through the end of the Spring 2001 semester.

3.  Actively work with faculty relying on SGI-only software for
courses to find non-SGI alternatives or develop other transition
plans. 

4.  Plan end-of-support date for private workstations to coincide
with removal of machines from clusters (i.e. summer of 2003)

Because we are very aware of the importance of Molecular
Simulations Incorporated software to a number of departments, we
are committed to working to find a way to support this software
for instructional use, and during the coming six months will be
following what directions MSI Inc chooses to take regarding what
platforms and configurations it plans to support, so that we can
allocate our own resources accordingly.  (They are aware, as are
we, that SGI is phasing out support for the MIPS platform running
IRIX on their low end client workstations, and are also looking to
other platforms.)  We intend to involve those faculty who are
heavy users of this software in our fact-finding and
decision-making.

For those faculty who have written "home-grown" software that
works only on the SGI, there are sources of funding available for
supporting work during the next 18 to 24 months to port your
homegrown software to other platforms.  If you would like to apply
to Academic Computing for funds to support the porting of such
software, please send a short proposal to ac-proposals@mit.edu,
describing the effort and resources required .

When one deals with information technology, whether in the
instructional or in the administrative sphere, change is
inevitable.  The important thing is to have enough lead time to
make the transition gracefully rather than in response to an
emergency.  We are trying to provide that lead time in this case.

We thank you for providing the information that you sent to us,
and are glad to answer questions that you might have regarding
this topic.

		Naomi