The Mississippi supercomputer project or what's a nice machine like you doing ina place like Mississippi?

Abstract

The news that there is a supercomputer on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi is almost always met initially with disbelief and then with interest, envy, and sometimes with considerable relief that it is Ole Miss which is having to cope! The experiences of the Office of Computing and Information Systems at the University before, during, and after the installation of the supercomputer system may be of interest to other universities contemplating major changes. In March of 1987, the Computer Center was notified that the state of Mississippi was probably to be the recipient of a large gift from a major oil company. The gift consisted of a Control Data Corporation Cyber 205, a CDC frontend computer, and assorted peripherals and equipment, such as printers and air conditioning units. Six months after the final paperwork was signed, the computers were installed and were operational in a completely newly renovated building on a campus which had never been a CDC installation, having been first a DEC 10 site and then an Amdahl 470 V/8 site.What happens to the User Services Area of a university computer center when a major new resource is introduced, one which requires completely new thinking in the areas of operating systems, user interface, languages, and algorithm design? The support staff must be trained, new personnel must be located, hired, and trained; complacent users must be recruited, anxious users must be encouraged and assisted, and expectations must be adjusted. Because of the publicity surrounding such a generous gift, there were immediate requests for accounts and access. There were misconceptions about using the machine; some users expected just to log on and pick up where they left off on their Amdahl CMS accounts. There was a dearth of some manuals and an excess of others. The user services staff and the systems support staff were scrambling to attend training classes, to train each other, and to train users.This paper will discuss how the Computer Center met the challenges which were encountered in setting up the physical site and organizing the support staff, how they were able to adjust their user support efforts for the supercomputer users, and how this machine has affected future plans, well as how Mississippi, one of the nation's poorest states, became the owner of a supercomputer.