The Office of the Chief Information Officer held an all-hands meeting on Oct. 28. Jon Bakken, Jim Amundson and I presented. Here are our top five takeaways:
- My own Top 4 projects that represent the most important work that I need everyone’s help with includes: submitting a strategic plan for CMS High-Luminosity LHC software and computing R&D activities; developing a preliminary operations plan for Mu2e; developing a pre-operations plan for DUNE; and ensuring that multi-factor authentication and important web security measures are implemented. Regarding multifactor authentication for email, we are currently investigating technical solutions that are the best fit for our user community. We will be communicating more about this as we work out the details.
- What do Nigel’s Top 5 have to do with us? We are either directly working on major projects or are providing support for our colleagues to accomplish their tasks. Some of our contributions include computing for simulations for PIP-II, SURF networking, cybersecurity, engineering applications, file storage, virtual machines and desktop engineering. And we are doing all this work safely.
- Last January, Nigel asked me to set up a joint task force with Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago to find areas in which we could collaborate. There has been excellent progress on joint cybersecurity work and joint purchases. In addition, a monthly seminar series has been established to cover scientific topics (See more on this below.)
- Nahn Tran has moved from PPD into SCD, in which he will lead a new project, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) project. Tran (formerly of PPD) will discuss his work at the inaugural joint task force computational science seminar. We will publish broadcast details on Fermilab at Work.
- Like physical safety, cybersecurity is everyone at the lab’s responsibility. Cybersecurity Awareness Week is Tuesday, Nov. 5, through Thursday, Nov. 7, with sessions beginning at 10:30 a.m. You do not need to be a cybersecurity expert to learn something at this event and required ITNA classes are offered each day. See agenda and course descriptions.
Liz Sexton-Kennedy is the chief information officer at Fermilab.