[Editor's note: this is a speech that I gave at the College of Engineering Open House in April, 2004]
How is everyone today?
My name is Jason Young, I’m the computing systems group manager for the information technology group in the College of Engineering. Along with Kathy Mayberry, our coordinator for student owned computing, I want to welcome you today to our Engineering Open House.
I’m pretty excited to be here today talking to you. It’s one of the few times of the year that they let me out of the basement. Oh It’s great to see the sun again.
Our systems group is responsible for managing, maintaining and integrating new technologies into our College-wide computing environment, known as “Eos.” “Eos” integrates into our campus-wide “Unity” computing environment managed by our Academic Information Technology Division.
Unity provides a number of central services available to all students, including a campus-wide email account, access to network storage and personal web page publishing, access to a number of different computing lab facilities across campus loaded with a number of commercial software packages for math, statistics, mapping, and graphics. Unity also provides access to our world-class high speed campus network which is connected to other Triangle Universities and to the global internet. Our connection to those, cough, “blue schools” runs at speeds over 800 times of most top-end cable modem services (that’s 45,000 times that of a dialup connection!)
Each of our Colleges at NC State build and innovate on this “Unity” foundation, providing additional computing services to the students in the degree programs in the college - we have great GIS/Mapping tools in our College of Natural Resources, our Vet School has an innovative program using handhelds, our Physical/Mathematical Sciences has some unique high-performance initiatives…
But wait a minute, this is the Engineering Open House. What about Engineering? I’m an Engineering graduate, I graduated from NC State in 1996 with a degree in Computer Science - and maybe I’m a little biased, but I can’t imagine a better College for computing.
Today, our Eos environment builds on those University-wide Unity services with over 650 computers in 20 different College-wide labs that run multiple and diverse operating systems, including Solaris, Linux, and Windows. And that’s not all, there are another 600 computers in program-specific labs in each of our 12 departments, and hundreds more in graduate and research offices across the college, running everything from Solaris to Linux, to Windows, to the Macintosh OS X operating systems. You get a chance to work and have exposure to all of the different environments that Professional Engineers use.
And it’s not just computing labs, the systems group alone runs close to 60 different servers for storage, web sites and applications, remote access, and software license management.
Software is where Eos really shines. Computing is so integral to every program in our college, not just for computer scientists like myself. We have high-end simulation packages, advanced computer aided design (CAD) packages, numeric analysis. One of packages used by many of our Mechanical Engineers, can simulate the stress on the steering and braking systems in a turning vehicle. Our CAD packages let you design industrial parts and connect those to fabrication machines to actually physically build and mold your designs. This is millions (meeeeelyons) of dollars of software available to our undergraduates and graduates alike.
Let me tell you about the most important part of “Eos” - now, a running comment on our environment’s name is that it stands for “Engineering Operating System”
Now I’m a computing guy, I’m really interested in both the theory and the practical design of the “operating system” software that runs on our computer. And you know, I can’t think of a more apt description for “Eos” - an operating system has many different components that build up on each other. Our computers and our network provide the resources for the most important part of what makes “Eos” great and that’s our people. When I graduated in 1996, I went to work for IT consulting company for awhile, but I had a great opportunity to come back to the University. I really wanted to come back to this place - because of the people here.
We have an amazing faculty, that excel in research and in teaching. We have a great support staff, and we have an outstanding group of Engineering students. I know computing, but our students do awesome (and sometimes crazy) things with our computers and software that never cease to amaze me.
Right now, this open house comes at a really unique time in our computing history. It’s a little daunting. We are starting to integrate and design new technologies into this Eos computing infrastructure. We have a real need for remote application delivery, both on campus and distance. We are seeing more and more powerful mobile computers and handheld devices. New operating systems like OS X, and advances in Linux. Advances in Networking, not just on campus, but to homes and in wireless and cellular.
The entire computing industry has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, it will change dramatically again, and we have the challenge to build an environment that can accommodate technologies that haven’t even been invented yet.
How do you do that? Well you start, not with the technology, but with the people. You are here today at the beginning of a redesign, a reinvigoration of our Eos environment a “Eos 2.0″ if you will. We already had a great network and computing system. We want to build this Eos2 on that people part, empowering you to learn about computing concepts in ways that are as fundamental as the basic math and physics and chemistry concepts. Computing is that essential to modern Engineering. We are beginning to redesign our introductory computing courses, working with our faculty and our students to teach not only what Eos is today, but how to better take advantage of your own computers and integrate them into this Engineering Operating System so that you are creating those new technologies.
I hope you come to NC State, because you will part of a group leading that change as we design an Eos to take us into the next 4,5, 10 years. Inventing those new technologies. You are the future of our computing environment.
And it’s starting now, and really kicking off this fall, as we focus on our Student-Owned Computing Pilot, and begin to pilot this education program for our students - pilot seminars for our faculty and grow our remote access and software services targeted at our owned computers and to talk more about that, let me introduce Kathy Mayberry, our coordinator of Student Owned Computing to talk about those student owned computers and our pilot program…
