Ytdyklly

I'm currently working as a PhD student.

I am not working on a tech-oriented PhD. However, my project requires a lot of programming. This involves both working on a computation cluster, servers, and working with a variety of software. These are provided and maintained by our faculty IT support.

Now on the reason why I post: the first problems started when working on our server, maintained by our IT staff. I required some software essential to do my work, but because I have no admin rights, I cannot install what I need. I asked IT very politely (I'm the new one after all), and they let me know that they would handle it as soon as possible.

Two weeks later, I still did not have access to the software I desperately needed to do my work. I had to ask my promotor (luckily a huge help in this matter) to ask IT, and finally the software was installed.

The following cycle continued until now:

1. I notice that software is missing / outdated / not working properly


2. I ask IT to fix the issue because no other options are available


3. IT ignores my requests, leading to me having difficulties to meet deadlines


4. Someone with better credentials has to pressure IT into fixing the issue

Like I mentioned earlier, I absolutely love programming and computers in general, so I can fix almost all issues myself. However, my hands are tied because I have no admin rights, and IT goes to great lengths to avoid that a non IT person does something / installs something on one of the computers...

Does some here have similar experiences, and do you know how to smoothen this out? I obviously don't want to cause a ruckus in our department, but I also believe it to be unfair that we are blocked from doing our job. I'm not the only employee who was bottlenecked by IT, so I guess all suggestions are welcome!

This is a partial solution I've used myself, and it assumes a few things:

• You access your clusters remotely through a connection (like other answers pointed, cloud servers or remote), so where you work isn't exactly the bottleneck.


• The software you use isn't OS dependent or has any special licenses


• You do not have a ton of things hooked up from serial ports to measuring equipment and whatnot.

One thing I've done in this situation is, when you finally grab a ticket from IT, ask them to install a virtual machine like VirtualBox and have them enable virtualization in the BIOS. Most processors allow this nowadays. Make sure they install it properly or they will ghost again.

This basically allows you to install any Linux distribution you want (you need Licenses for Windows images), so it is an operating system where you have all admin rights. This completely removes the IT middleman if your case is just coding and clustering the data crunching since you don't need their permission to do things in the VM, and also shouldn't impact performance significantly.

If IT is worth half a dime, they will appreciate the solution, since:

• It takes gargantuan effort to compromise the Host Machine through a VM if you are not malicious


• Resulting lack of tickets from you needing something updated/installed.

Worst case scenario you can still alternate between both Operating Systems, and do small things in the VM with your admin rights.

We had this issue with some Silicon Graphics machines - we removed them from the IT departments control - with the support of the supervisors whose budgets had paid for them and controlled everything ourselves...

Much better... We had more uptime and fewer issues than any other group / team on campus...

We learnt a lot about compiling & installing etc etc...

Not sure if you can go that route...

Note, the software we were using was CFD and the IT dept had no experience of what was needed...

I think this is a fairly common occurrence in many companies. There is a big disconnect between the researchers trying to do their work and the IT staff who may be under-resourced, under-trained or limited by administrative policy. In my experience there is often lots of worry about researchers installing software without fully understanding the security implications. In short, I would not expect you to be able to change this policy and it may well be in place for sound reasons.

One solution that has been suggested to me is that academics can apply for time using different cloud compute solutions (e.g. Google compute https://cloud.google.com/edu/, Microsoft Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/education/, any many more). If successful you will be given compute time in a virtual machine where you will have appropriate administrative rights to install any software you want.

Since you're not in a "tech-oriented PhD", I'm guessing the cluster is 10 machines or less? If so, consider setting up your own cluster on any of the big cloud providers. AWS and Azure come to mind, but Google and IBM are still trying to hang on in those markets.

Thoughts on pricing:

• You don't have to have the cluster up all the time, so you don't have to pay for 24hrs/day for a full month. You would have to figure out how to save/load the data and install some programs quickly (docker?), if you opt for shutting down some or all servers.


• If you have fellow students or professors who are in the same boat, consider sharing your cluster and its expenses.


• Depending on your research, you might (eventually) be able to get special pricing from some vendors.


• On AWS, reserved instances are cheaper than spot instances.

Look at how much your time is worth, and how much these delays are impacting your research. If IT delays cost you 1 week of delays every month, then it's probably worth setting up things yourself. (Remember to back things up, and test your backup strategy. Put your code and data in github)

And lastly, are you using their ticketing system for your requests, or just asking them verbally? If there's no ticket, it'll surely be forgotten 5 minutes after you spoke to them.

Whilst others have focused on giving you some technical advice on alternatives to using your institution's infrastructure, I want to note that your problems are not uncommon. In my practice I opted to installing the software myself (a lot of software packets I used do not need root privileges for installation, make sure that admin access for yours is really a must) or asked supervisor for help.

If you are on good terms with your supervisor, you can always ask him for help, going from as little as cc-ing him in software installation emails that you send to your IT department to directly asking him for help when those request emails are ignored. In many organizations it's not easy for junior members to be listened to and that's just something you have to get over with.