Funky architectural constraints, rogue wireless nets and ad hoc grids are all part of a day’s work for MIT’s Jack Costanza, a lab IT director.
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If doctors make the worst patients, does a user community of supreme techies translate into the worst kind of nightmare for an IT director? Not according to Jack Costanza.
Costanza is IT director for the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He runs “t!g” – shorthand for “the infrastructure group” – a lean, eight-person team responsible not only for implementing and managing CSAIL’s central computing and network services but also for providing help desk support to certain CSAIL research groups.
The latter is no easy task. Some pretty heavyweight users, with unconventional ideas, populate these research groups. From sensor networks and microprocessor design to robotics and image-guided surgery, their projects regularly tap into CSAIL’s network infrastructure.
For example, last year a group of researchers launched Roofnet, an 802.11b mesh network of more than 50 nodes atop Cambridge apartment buildings. This rooftop wireless network provides Internet service while letting its creators research scalable routing protocols.
Yes, tying Roofnet into CSAIL’s core network means more work for t!g, particularly on the security front. But Costanza, 44, accepts this and other network add-ons as par for the course, opting to invite rather than exclude. “We try not to build large walls on our borders, as much as protect what we end up with,” he says. “We really don’t know from day to day what users are going to throw at us, but that’s what makes the place interesting.”
Over the past two years, Costanza’s job has been even more interesting than usual. The t!g team faced three major tasks: merging two distinct user communities, building an entirely new network infrastructure and physically moving to new quarters.
The merger refers to the combining of MIT’s Lab for Computer Science (LCS) and Artificial Intelligence Lab (AIL). Costanza has a history with both labs – he joined LCS in 1984 before moving to AIL in 1996.
The new entity, CSAIL, is one of the main tenants of a funky new building designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. Dedicated in May, the 730,000-square-foot Ray and Maria Stata Center also houses the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
Passersby see an irregular combination of brick, stainless steel and painted white aluminum building sections. But for Costanza, the highlight of Stata Center is on the inside of the building – a 10G bit/sec optical Ethernet backbone. Scattered throughout the building in different network neighborhoods are 32 Cisco Catalyst 6506 enterprise network switches, which provide 10/100/1000M ports at the LAN edge.
Wireless access is ubiquitous in the building. T!g runs 802.11 b and g – others are welcome to set up their own wireless nets, as long as they use a frequency range that doesn’t interfere, Constanza says.
Stata Center’s 10G bit/sec hub is the envy of campus network-hogs. Stata Center hadn’t been open one month when a computational biology research group asked to put its grid on CSAIL’s network, Costanza says.
Building an infrastructure that supported the merged groups required reconciling different IT philosophies. The artificial intelligence group tended toward a centralized infrastructure, while the computer scientists tended toward pockets of similar infrastructure, for example, Costanza says.
It also took wrangling with the building’s architects, whose original plans called for a dozen small computer rooms and no data closets. After discussions with t!g, the architects worked in fewer, bigger computer rooms to allow for more centralized computing and storage resources.
But t!g never got the data closets it wanted – which meant the Cisco 6506 switches had to sit in populated areas. When the noise turned out to be too much for nearby users, Costanza’s team wound up encasing each big, loud, heat-generating switch in its own “architecturally pleasant,” soundproof, ventilated container.
That wasn’t the only manual labor required. During construction, t!g members spent a lot of time in hardhats, carrying gear and laying cables.
When the elevators were shut down at 3 p.m. each day – the time the union workers left the site – t!g folks used the stairs to get network equipment to where it needed to be. And when the company hired to do the cable layout in Stata Center dissolved in the middle of the project, t!g picked up the slack – which meant doing the design drawings and managing the installation process.
“We didn’t want to be what got in the way of stuff getting done on time,” Costanza says.
Costanza’s AeroBed got a lot of use during those days.
Looking back on the past two years, Costanza says he’s learned a lot about how hard it is to build a new network in a construction zone.
But he’s pleased with the results. “We like to think we’ve built a production network that enables everyone to get to their research without the headaches,” he says. “We want to be the conduit for researchers. If they really need to set up something special, we’ll do that too.”
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