Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2020-03-16 The meeting was called to order at 19:35 by wmoses. In attendance were Student keyholders: mrittenb, wmoses, mwnguyen, gshay, alvareza, emmabat, aathalye Associate keyholders: belmonte, quentin, kenta, mcyoung, wqian94 Members: mau, mitimmy | dbopp Guests: '() Administrivia: wmoses: Welcome to the apocalypse - I mean the SIPB meeting. wmoses: We are now all remote. There is an MIT-wide Zoom license. Everyone should be moving to whatever they choose as their safeest place. Obviously, number one priority for everyone should be getting to a reasonable place, getting a reasonable amount of food, figuring out how to survive the next couple of months. If anyone needs help with anything, please reach out and your community will try its best to help. emmabat: Of course, the second priority is to have the SIPB meeting every Monday. wmoses: Exactly. wmoses: Right before we left campus, Emma and I on Wednesday had a meeting with Olu Brown and IS&T. emmabat: That was Tuesday. wmoses: That was Tuesday, yes. emmabat: Wednesday was a different meeting. wmoses: Everything's a blur. kenta: I have an administrivia question before we start. On Zoom, is there a protocol of who gets to speak when? wmoses: There is a chat at the bottom. I would recommend chatting if you want to say something and we'll try to cycle through the things. Any opposition? Motion to whiteballot? wqian94: Wait, I'm raising my hand and I feel that the chair hasn't acknowledged my raised hand. wmoses: You don't have video. wqian94: No, raising my hand in Zoom. [discussion of raised hand button] wqian94: Can I propose that people who don't need to be on video mute their video because video is expensive for data? quentin: Can I suggest that anyone who has bandwidth problems disable video so that the rest of us can still see each other? [discussion of how to turn off video in the phone version of Zoom] wmoses: Anyway, in the meeting that happened at some point before we all left campus, we had a good conversation about cloud compute credits. In particular, IS&T offered to make us a SIPB AWS account so that we could distribute about 25K in cloud compute credits, which I think would be especially useful right now. emmabat: Though we are all especially hosed. wmoses: Yeah, so I don't expect this in the immediate future, but if it does come, that would potentially be useful. wmoses: The head of infrastructure for the college of computing asked to reschedule because he is also hosed. wmoses: We also talked about the future of Athena. Namely that Debathena is likely to get sunset at some point, and discussion of what are the key pieces that we and the community would like to be able to keep. The most important parts that we discussed were MIT login and filesystem automounting. If you have thoughts on that let me or Emma now. wmoses: We also requested 10G access to SMR, but given the things that are happening, it's very TBD as to when that will occur. But there may be 10G in a SMR - probably not near you, but still. emmabat: We also talked about new UPS's for the machine room from IS&T. They say they have spares. wmoses: UPS info: - eaton 9px’s 2kba units; controller with an extended battery module -6 520R recepticles and 1 L5-20R - rack mountable for 20inch racks - nema 20R quentin: We mostly just need new batteries, not new UPS's. wmoses: If they are offering them, I'll leave it to HWOPS to decide what they need. quentin: You need to keep approving people for Zoom. wmoses: I will figure out how to make it autoapprove people in the future. wmoses: We were going to have an EC meeting, but that was postponed. I will let you know when it ends up being scheduled. Project Reports: dbopp: The update on CPW is that there is no update. We tried to discuss it with the students in charge of interfacing between us and admin but very reasonably it did not happen. I'm probably going to ping again mid this week, and if it still doesn't happen maybe just email the admin. quentin: Swipe right on Android to get to an audio only view. [more dicussion of how Zoom works] wqian94: Are you talking about the safe driving mode? quentin: Yes, that appears to be the audio only mode. alvareza: The Hyades meeting did not happen. kenta: If you need to ssh to office heads, keyholders should have access. Reach out and we will actually run sync-sipb. kenta: At some point I may put together an inventory of what we have in the office. wmoses: HWOPS has a list of all the server infrastructure, we should add the list of stuff in the office. quentin: I confirmed that the Zoom Android app only sends video of people you are seeing on the screen. wqian94: Excellent. Wonderful. Thank you. wmoses: Relatedly, does everyone know how to create their MIT Zoom account? There is a website mit.zoom. [discussion of setting your username in Zoom] wqian94: There is a setting under participants where you can set your name for this meeting. wmoses: SIPB-WISP also did not have a meeting, but we will figure out a way to continue. emmabat: All our hardware is in the SMR, turned off. mcyoung: That just means we have to deploy the SMR crack team! wmoses: The "SMR crack team" is achernya / Emma / Lizhou. In addition to the SMR, they were given access to the Media Lab, where the Hyades stuff is. emmabat: I think the Stud is closing to students. [discussion of being allowed in the student center] wqian94: I suggest a five-story long rope, and then you get the benefit of a gym membership as well as fixing stuff in the SMR. Other: wmoses: MIT people get free Zoom PE and wellness classes. wqian94: It's also available if you don't have MIT gym membership. wqian94: Apparently HHS was hacked and a bunch of people were told fake news about coronavirus and shutting down the entire country. quentin: I hear Google is using 1700 engineers to build a website to help people find a testing site. [laughter] wmoses: I have also heard that, repeatedly, from one source. [discussion of the reliability of this source] mcyoung: There's no better way to get HR to move around employees than to get the president to say something about it. If only I could learn that trick. Other Other: alvareza: Seniors getting kicked out and not having a graduation is sooner than you think. [many oofs] wmoses: Yeah, move out date is sooner than you think. quentin: Congratulations everyone on completing your year at MIT. emmabat: We're not done, we do still have to pass our classes, They have however changed the grading system to "Pass by emergency" and "No record by emergency". quentin: I didn't say you completed your year of MIT, just at MIT. wqian94: Congrats on being the first class in probably a hundred years to get two weeks of spring break at MIT. emmabat: We are so fortunate. quentin: Has emergency grading ever been used before? emmabat: I don't know. The class of '70 didn't get commencement because a shooting happened in May. quentin: My guess is that we get commencement in September. kenta: I saw someone's mockup of what a virtual commencement might look like. [discussion of virtual commencement being bad] wmoses: Now is the perfect time to take your swim test, especially if you don't like water. You can learn to swim over the internet. quentin: They suggested some requirements will be waived if necessary. mwnyugen: Will the swim test be curved? [discussion of Minecraft] wmoses: If you want to play jackbox games together, I've done that in the past with remote friends. belmonte: I think you should all come up with creative ideas for entertaining my son online when his school is closed and I still have to work. wqian94: If you want to visit the great country of Canada, you need a Canadian or American passport. wmoses: I heard just Canadian. emmabat: Summer internship programs are starting to get cancelled. wqian94: I hear they might consider remote internships. quentin: I miss you guys already. wmoses: We miss you too Quentin. wmoses: The next in person SIPB meeting is sooner than you think. I hope. wmoses: Anything for the new coronavirus section of meeting? emmabat: I think we already discussed coronavirus a lot. [discussion of whether the president has coronavirus] [discussion of whether food mob was a good idea] kenta: I used to do comp bio. I looked at the coronavirus RNA sequence. It's available online. Someone has crystallized the protein structure. You can look at it. wmoses: Folding at home is trying to figure out how the coronavirus works if you have free cycles. belmonte: There was a 2015 paper in a Nature journal about bat coronaviruses maybe making the leap to humans. People have looked at the sequence homology and it does seem to come from a bat coronavirus, but some is from pangolins. The meeting was adjourned at 20:02. Minutes taken and submitted by mrittenb.