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For at least a decade, US higher ed has been all-in on outsourcing as much IT to Google and MS as possible. It's been years since the last major US university replaced internally-operated email with one of those two.
One of the few computer-related services not yet completely surrendered to "the cloud" is HPC, but that's not for lack of trying. Years of literally screaming lies into the faces of researchers and IT people has taken its toll - a generation quit/retired/laid off.
To me, this all amounts to en-masse institutional self lobotomization. The talent that created the collection of technologies we call the Internet were replaced by service contracts with monopolists - contracts negotiated by incompetent poseurs. The result is the complete loss of self-determination - you get what they let you have.
The old team isn't getting back together, but efforts like Othernets might help us field the team we need now.
@lolcat Do you know my cloudheads paper abt. this?
No, but thanks for the pointer!
I assume this is the paper?
@lolcat Not sure if it is the newest version; This one is for sure: http://dx.doi.org/10.56553/popets-2023-0044
Also check out this report: http://dx.doi.org/10.17617/2.3532055
(all open access)
Thanks again for pointing me at your paper. The section on "Cloud Infrastructures and Power" neatly tracks ideas I have shared with Bert in earlier correspondence. FWIW, in my experience, the Uni and IT admins responsible for negotiating these agreements with Big Cloud were in deep over their heads. People with no business background at all were suddenly expounding on the importance of OPEX v CAPEX, etc. It made them feel good to cosplay as captains of industry.
The following section on Academic Freedom also rings true. All the way back in 2000, Intel granted million$$ in equipment to universities through their Education 2000 program.
At one R1 uni, several million$ were split between Arts & Sci and Engineering. The meddlesome CS chair who would go on to become a don in the Cloud Mafia was the Engineering PI, and he required all equipment procured for his college to run MS Windows.
...
...
He garnered huge credit with Redmond, but it meant most of the gear ended up being used as doorstops.
Later, when fundraising for new buildings, the boot licking paid off several times over. Some might say that's just shrewd politics. Others might counter that that's a slippery slope with a pool of piranhas at the end.
One more observation, and I'll stop spamming Mastodon.
You observe that in the absence of intra-institutional coordination, universities struggle to support alternatives to Big Cloud. In the US, one of the largest IT collaborations is Internet2, and it appears to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of those same cloud interests.
Lots of public interest laws regarding accepting gifts in excess of a few bucks are routinely violated at those meetings.
@lolcat @tfiebig That is quite an accusation.
For many in R&E, there is lots to criticize. Its initiatives are too niche, driven largely by a small handful of projects or people that are of little interest to most members. Or the member cost is of dubious value - I was very, very close to dropping membership for my institution a few years ago.
They look a lot like a buying consortium now, but to suggest they are corrupt? No, without any evidence, such an insinuation can be as easily dismissed as it was made.
Maybe I should have been clearer. I'm not suggesting anyone was receiving envelopes stuffed with cash, but something much more prosaic. You've probably heard the axiom that academic politics are so brutal because the stakes are so low? I'm claiming the value of steak and cocktails consumed sometimes (routinely) exceeds allowable limits. It's not only untoward, but also against the rules for state employees.
@lolcat I will hopefully have something to share on _that_ in the future as well. ;-)
@lolcat Could not agree more. Been in DOE HPC for over 20 years, and yikes the things that I am seeing.
At the risk of coming off all conspiratorial, from where I sit the Big Data people and the Cloud people were a near union set, and their main motivation was turning the data collected about us by the hyperscalers into $$.
Back in 2012, they didn't know the result would be gen AI. In fact, one of their loudest claims back then was: "It's not about the cycles, it's about the data!!!!!" Which was as nonsensical as it sounds.
Of course, now we have MS buying nukes to run those GPUs.
As I sit here finishing a tuna salad sandwich and a beer, I recall at least 3 occasions between 2012 and 2017 in which our regional DoE lab, PNNL, with the support of university admin and one especially powerful and troublesome CS chair, simply asserted that they were taking over our on-prem HPC operation. In one case, they even issued a press release or two, which led to stories in PNW press.
They only failed because (at the risk of flattering myself) I intervened, and...
... because our HPC operation was owned and governed by the users.
It turns out that it was a critical miscalculation on the part of central admin and IT to refuse to support centralized HPC. That forced the research community to cooperate to create a system largely outside central control. So, instead of DoE just needing sign off from the Vice Provost for Research, they were confronted by hundreds of researchers with tens of million$$ of their own money invested.
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It also helped that HPC was the only customer propping up the new, on-prem data center.
Years earlier, the Cloud Mafia, before they identified as such, had successfully lobbied the state legislature for million$$ to build the facility. By the time engineering work began, they knew they'd f'd up, and did everything they could to cripple the facility for HPC. Nonetheless, they knew they'd look stupid if the facility remained empty, so we had that in our back pocket.
As long as I'm way out here alone on this limb, I'll also say that DoE positioned people as faculty at large regional public universities specifically for the purpose of preventing any on-prem HPC. As soon as it was clear they'd failed, these people disappeared back into the national labs.
I also regard one former PNNL HPC leader, long since sequestered at a different national lab, to be a national security risk (angry drunk with a security clearance)
It is a weird, weird world.