Dear Colleagues:

I write to inform you that on February 1, through a cooperative agreement with UC Santa Barbara, Russ Hobby started working part time with IET on the UC Davis Cyber-Infrastructure Program.

Under the guidance of Morna Mellor, the Director of Data Center and Client Services, Russ' role will be primarily as a Cyber-Infrastructure Program Architect. Drawing on his many years of experience and expertise in the technologies that created today's 'cyber-infrastructure', Russ will provide leadership and programmatic direction to IET and will contribute substantially to the strategic goal of enhancing high performance computing and networking services to meet the present and future needs of the campus research community. Toward that goal, he will develop an institutional understanding of what the campus needs in those areas, and he will work with various entities-both on campus and off-to achieve effective methods and infrastructure options that will address those needs. He will look at potential service options including distributed high-performance computing; shared centralized high-performance computing; centralized and distributed technical support; grid computing; and the standardizing of platforms, operating systems, storage and applications.

Russ will also help develop plans that target UC Davis's specific strengths, challenges and directions involving research activities that concern inter-disciplinary research, data storage, security, facilities requirements, staffing, sustainable business planning, integration with IET-Data Center services, integration with IET-Communications Resources services, and regional, national and international network connectivity.

Russ has long been active in the research and application of networking, and has participated in the development of the Internet from its early days. At UC Davis, in the 1990s, he directed the IT-Advanced Networked and Scientific Applications (ANSA) unit, and most recently he has been chief technical architect of the End-To-End Performance Initiative for Internet2. Russ has extensive experience working on high-performance computing projects in various disciplines, from physics to earthquake engineering, astronomy, and sensor grids. He is a member of the EDUCAUSE Campus Cyber-infrastructure Working Group and heads the Cyber-Infrastructure Days Program, a consortium of national organizations (TeraGrid, Open Science Grid, Internet2, National Lamda Rail, EDUCAUSE, and others) that come together to help campuses enhance their cyberinfrastructure services. The first of those CI Days workshops was held at UC Davis last April.

Russ can be contacted at rdhobby@ucdavis.edu. Please join me in welcoming him back to UC Davis.

Regards,

Peter M. Siegel
Vice Provost-Information and Educational Technology
And Chief Information Officer