Building a network for supreme techies

摘要

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.