To: cease@MIT.EDU
Cc: ganderso@MIT.EDU
Subject: Notes from our 10/8/99 meeting
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 13:19:15 -0400
From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" <nschmidt@MIT.EDU>


Attending were Abby, Alex, Bob, and Naomi

Alex has received two replies to his questions from software
vendors, none from MSI.  He will wait until he hears from them
before reporting back to the group.

Naomi distributed a draft of the questionnaire that she will be
sending out to faculty, and input was collected.  Abby gave Naomi
a list of names collected from chord acl's, 4-035 reservations,
f_l collective memory, our email archive, and DASH courses.

Abby has logs from the MSI license server.  We will continue to
gather data on its usage.

Naomi distributed Scenario 1 for how we might phase out SGIs in
the clusters over a period of years and will prepare a number of
other scenarios for the next meeting.

It was suggested that we consider R5000s as Quickstations if we
remove them from the clusters

Costs for third party software - dropping a platform woudln't
change our costs for 3partysw for something like Matlab.  (This
was corroborated by Marine in subsequent discussions - we usually
pay for totally number of licenses, not per platform.)

Next week:  Bill may have a reply back from SGI.  We'll check with
him on Thursday afternoon (although we may not be able to be in
touch with him since he's returning from vacation that day)

Alex had hoped to have more replies from vendors, but he will not
be at this week's meeting and probably not at next week's either.