My trip to BioIT World, 2015.

Hi all, my name is Jeremy Hallum,  I work up in NCRC as a Biomedical Computation Research Consultant/Facilitator.  I'd like to share with everyone my experiences at BioIT World in Boston this year.  

Introduction

BioIT World is a conference and expo that describes itself as: “a place that provides the perfect venue to share information and discuss enabling technologies that are driving biomedical research and the drug development process."

The conference covers a wide variety of topics in Biomedical research, from hard IT topics like IT infrastructure, software, Data Security and Cloud Computing to science and scientific tools in Bioinformatics, Next-Gen Sequencing Informatics, Clinical and Traditional Informatics, and Clinical Genomics.   It is held at the World Trade Center in Boston every April, and this year it was April 21-23.  

This is the third year that I have attended the conference, and this year I have concentrated on Research IT infrastructure, Cloud Computing, and a bit of the Data Security Track.  Between this conference and the Supercomputing Conference, it’s pretty easy to stay on top of what colleagues and vendors are providing researchers at other institutions, both corporate and educational, through both formal lecture sessions and the product expo floor. 

The overriding themes of the conference this year were:

1. the increasing maturity of the private cloud framework, and
2. the emerging ability to build converged (or “hyper-converged”) architecture solutions, via solutions as OpenStack or SwiftStack, or VMWare’s EVO:RAIL, or HP’s Goliath)
3. the maturity of the object storage frameworks and the ability to transition from a private object storage pool to either EC2 or Google storage. 

Sessions

The first highlight session of the conference is the Trends from the Trenches talk by Chris Dagdigian from BioTeam.  If you can’t peruse his slide deck, here are the highlights:

• Everything now has an API on the back end.  If you can’t massively automate your operational environment, you are behind the curve.   
• Hyperconverged architectures are well on their way to being a reality. 
• Keep an eye on high performance networking.  The Mellanox Connect-X 4 framework includes both FDR and EDR infiniband ports and 10Gbit, 40 Gbit, and 100 Gbit ethernet on the same card!
• Object storage is the future, data will be accessible via software, and there will be a rich catalog of metadata able to be stored with it to identify it and it's qualities. 
• Having standard "building blocks" of storage, networking and compute for your environment for easy upgrades are keys to easily maintaining your environment and making it easily upgradeable.  

Another highlight is via Dirk Petersen from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research in Seattle.  His team has successfully deployed an object based backup and economy file storage system using Swift Stack.   It has features that make it pretty easy to use with a command line and GUI interface to import data to a higher tier.  So instead of mounting the data store to a server, a user would  use software to copy the object to/from the cluster/compute server for analysis or storage.  They tried using a data transfer service that emulates an NFS/CIFS mount from the object stores for researchers to transfer data, but they found that it was up to 10x slower to do so, so they deprecated the service after the first year.  

The third highlight session was an overview of the Broad Institute’s environment by Chris Dwan, Director of Research Computing.

He presented the direction that they are going in, which is towards more of an automated, private cloud environment, starting strictly from a compute perspective (leaving storage, and SDN out of the picture).   It gives them the local flexibility to give people VMs to be able to do work, but also allow for them to burst their research out of the private cloud, and into Amazon or Google’s environment.  

He also spoke of their changes in their storage environment, where they use Avere’s caching technology to connect their edge file storage with Amazon to create something that looks like an exabyte filesystem.  They are also building a multi-PB object store for their long-term project storage, and they are coming up with a series of internal standards for their data so that they can find things quickly and easily in their environments, especially given their massive intake of data (~100TB a week! from 60+ sequencers)

Other sessions I visited are (if you have any questions about any of these sessions, just contact me): 

• Introduction to EVO:RAIL by VMware
• Comparisons of Storage Efficiencies through Hadoop
• Rapid Integration of Cancer Genomics data through Hadoop and Cloudera’s Impala
• Accelerating Biomedical Research Discovery: The 100G Internet2 Network – Built and Engineered for the Most Demanding Big Data Science Collaborations
• Managing Genomic Data at Scale! - Rules Based Intelligent Data Management
• Beyond Parallel Filesystems: NVMe Storage for Genomics Workflows
• The Expanding Face of Meta Data
• Intelligent Infrastructure Approaches for Emerging Life Sciences Data Management Issues at Scale
• How Next Generation Scale-Out Storage Fuels Breakthroughs in Life Sciences
• Start Small, Collaborate Often, Grow Big – Scaling NGS Compute and Storage Solutions for Personalized Medicine
• Out of the Trenches and Into the Future: Mixing File and Object Storage Architectures
• Breaking the $1,000 Genome Sequencing Barrier with Object Storage
• OpenFDA: IT and Informatics Innovation at the FDA
• Global Developments in Privacy and Data Security Law

Vendors

On the vendor floor, even most of the traditional vendors were touting their object storage capabilities alongside of their traditional block storage.  There were two specific object storage only vendors on the floor:  the most notable being SwiftStack and Cleversafe, and then a host of storage vendors that provided either both, or a way to transition object storage to block storage: DDN, Qumulo, Avere, EMC/Isilon, HP, Thinkmate/SuperMicro, Dell and IBM.

Other than some interesting conversations that I had with several vendors (particularly Cleversafe and Avere), I won’t go into too much detail in vendor offerings here.  Please feel free to peruse the vendor floorplan and contact me if you have any questions about any particular vendor’s offerings.

Conclusion

I think the big takeaway is: there has been the beginning of a transition between local, decentralized resources to a more private cloud infrastructure for researchers, and the development of more specialized private clouds for researchers who have more HPC specific needs, especially at the research focused institutes with a trend toward the bleeding edge of HPC.   Over time, this technology will begin to move from the research setting into more standard services, it may be only a matter of time now.    Because of this, it’s time to start looking into this transitional services and see what makes sense in our environment and work with our partners to craft a service that will meet the needs of Medical School researchers.

As always, if you have any questions about the conference, don't hesitate to contact me.

2 New Positions Posted - Service Desk Agents

Be a part of the solution!

Greetings MSIS-ers,

The MSIS resource management group recently approved 2 new Service Desk positions.  The job posting is now online at umjobs.org (posting 108620).  Erik Zempel, manager of the MSIS Service Desk, will be leading the hiring and interview process for these positions.

We are creating a new role within the Service Desk for staffing the Help Me Now locations. Service Desk Agents will have the opportunity to rotate into Help Me Now locations located in NCRC, Taubman Health Sciences Library (July ’15), and Towsley Center for Medical Education (Sept ’15).  This new role will augment the high-quality support that the Service Desk provides.

If you, or someone you know, is interested in being a part of a great team of IT professionals who are fanatical about customer support of technology, please consider getting in touch to learn more about the position.  

Apply by 4/23/15.

Telework; back to the office

Nothing snaps you back into being back at the office quite like the first day back after teleworking for a week solid. Upon reflection there are a couple takeaways that are worth noting. Maybe they will be helpful for you and your teams as you approach navigating telework in your context.

1.) Telework is not only about you.
We have the benefit to be subdivided into smallish teams in MSIS. We do not have any great hulking collections of drones despite our department being one of the largest School information service delivering organizations. This more familial style allows us to partner with each other and work much more flexibly than I think most 200+ organizations can. When teleworking enters into the calculus for your team, consider that your physical absence will have an effect and that effect may be overtly or covertly damaging to reputation, workflow, relationships and a sense of community. I think that should be part of the discussion in your teams to consider how you will measure and look for those effects so your teleworking arrangement can be successful for you, your supervisor and your team.

2.) It does not have to be all telework or all conventional office space
I do not think I am as effective in my job working remotely as I am in the office. I also miss out on a lot of the garnishes of work that make it all a tad more interesting. I do think that there is a place in my work-life for a touch of telework  though. I have a pretty busy meeting schedule most weeks, but typically if I plan out about two weeks ahead I can find a half-day here or there wherein telework to catch up on those ever elusively resourced "medium priority" tasks have a chance to get accomplished.

3.) Our office space desperately lacks Labradors.
Labradors in my opinion would dramatically improve morale and the OneMSIS culture. I think this should be part of our MSIS Strategy Map for FY16 in a new strategic objective for our Internal perspective to "liberate snausages and empower coziness". Alas that being said, it may not make the cut for the updated Strategy Map for FY16 but lots of good work has been going into the strategy planning to help guide the organization and clearly relate how we all can see ourselves as part of being a strategy-driven organization. More updates on that to follow but I look forward to working with my teams on it more completely than prior years.

Thanks again go our to Tony Mignano and Gray Carper for being the engine that drove the Telework guidelines to completion and thanks to Cindy Leavitt for sponsoring the effort so that we could take a good idea and see it through to realization.

Telework; by the numbers

Tired of me talking about telework? Oh good...

Days 3 and 4 of me teleworking have gone quite as expected aside from a category 5 home network connection snafu. 

Some of the more noticeable consequences are along the line of the rhythm of the day when I am not in the office and that I can be far more predicative with how I account for time in my day now. I have to spend more time reaching out to people than I normally do though. When I am in the office there are opportunities to engage and encounter co workers I do not have if remote. Reflecting on this a bit, it also means that there are fewer opportunities for people to engage with me randomly, which is about as nicely as I can state the nature of our workspace without insinuating that it is an interruptions-driven vortex of distraction and low value meetings from which there is no escape.

I digress. 

As a noted in a prior post, productivity does appear to be on the upswing. I have been able to hammer through a chuck of my backlog faster than expected though I do not know what is being missed. That notion, that something is being missed or forgotten is the most challenging concern to address when working remote. I set to determine if there was anything quantifiable to understand it further. 

If I assume that my job is most quantifiable in the artifacts of communication and interaction, I should be able to determine if working remotely has impacted my week negatively through the meetings and their outcomes as well as emails and other similar means of typed modes. 

As it pertains to email, there has been a slight up tic in emails I have sent this week with little change of inbound messaging. On average I am sending into the ether about 430 emails a week related to UM efforts and this week I am projecting to be about 15% higher than that. I suppose that could be regular deviation but I have been compelled to write a few more messages to those I would otherwise assuredly bump into.

As it pertains to meetings though there has been more of an interesting shift. I tend to keep copious notes on my meetings I have throughout the week. Functionally, there are so many meetings that if I didn't have some rigor around this, I would never remember what was agreed upon and my obligations.  These notes have been helpful in understanding the impact of my telework. I have for UM purposes an average meeting (including ad hoc) tally of 44 meetings a week and of those the majority are 60 minutes long. This week, I have will have more along the lines of 15 with only 2 lasting 60 minutes. That seems substantial and is a warning signal to me that perhaps I am missing something important being remote. However, once I dug into the details of my meeting notes I realized that almost half of my regular meetings I have when I am in the office have no discernible outcomes or expected deliverables while of my current week's 15 there have resulted in 13 specific decisions or next steps. 

This can lead me to surmise that meetings and interruptions are driving out productivity, at least when I am in the office, and that perhaps occasional telework will have benefit long term. Additionally, I think I should be a touch less liberal with my schedule for meetings in general, yikes. 

MSIS Net Promoter Score Survey Results: January - March 2015

-- Gray Carper (gcarper@med.umich.edu)

Performance & Improvement Management just completed the first round of our periodic customer and staff feedback survey, based on Net Promoter Score methodology, and you'll find the results below. This data will catalyze improvement actions using existing mechanics, like our Problem Management process, and we'll be launching another survey round shortly. If you have any questions about this or any other improvement initiatives, please reach out to PIM.

Thanks to all of you who participated in the survey this time - please continue to do so in future rounds!  

Pros and Cons of Telecommuting

Pros and Cons of Telecommuting

Drew Montag

9 April 2015

So, I telecommuted (teleworked) yesterday, and here are my reactions.

Pros:

1.       Shorter commute.
2.       More comfortable dress code.
3.       Full service kitchen.
4.       Better bathroom facilities.
5.       Better lighting.
6.       More comfortable reading areas, using my work iPad.
7.       Less audio and visual distractions = MUCH better for “heads down” work.
8.       I didn’t disturb/infect anyone with my coughing and sneezing.
9.       Can listen to music without headphones.

Cons:

1.       No accidental collaboration.
2.       Can’t just walk around to find people in person.
3.       Temptations of a full service kitchen.
4.       Missing about 10 URLs in various tabs/browsers.
5.       Missing about 5 aliases in PuTTY windows.
6.       Only one screen at home.
7.       Work MacBook Pro is bigger/faster than my home Windows 7 box.
8.       I prefer the Mac version of Outlook to the Windows version.
9.       Better printing facilities at work.

Note that some of the Cons (4, 5, 7, and 8) could be fixed if I brought my MacBook Pro home with me.