Letter from Boston
Group Resources
By MASAKO YAMADA
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研究グループに必要な資源
雅子さんが所属する物理学の研究グループは、ボストン大学物理学部の中で最も人数の多いグループです。そのため、メンバーが指導教員と会う時間やコンピューターの台数などが不足し、不都合が生じることもしばしば。ところが最近、グループは補助金を受け、高性能コンピューターを10台新調することができました。
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My research group is by far the largest in the Physics
Department at Boston University. Whenever group meetings
are held, one can count on there being at least 25
people present. At times, there might even be 35 people
in the group at any given time.
This figure includes graduate students,
postdocs, visiting researchers, collaborators and
young interns
in high school and college. Some of the members are
affiliated with the group for only a few weeks or
months. Others have been with the group more than 10
years.
With so many people in the group, the allocation of
resources is a huge challenge. Sometimes, group members
get frustrated by the meager supplies available
relative to the demands of the group. The most important
resource is undoubtedly the time of our adviser, Gene
Stanley.
Members of the group must carefully schedule time with
him, since he is always extremely busy. After a while,
however, most people learn to work around his schedule,
and how to collaborate with other researchers.
Another resource is more necessary on a day-to-day
basis. Namely, our group has always been short on
computers. The group has two computer rooms with perhaps
20 computers. Some of them barely work. This is
obviously not sufficient given the size of our group,
especially as our research field is computational
physics.
There is a bit of a competition every day for
computers. I feel nervous when I go to school late, since
it means that I might not be able to get a computer for
the day. Some of the group members, including myself,
tend to sit at the same computer every day, and we've
started leaving our books and papers around that
computer.
However, this doesn't mean that the computer is for
our personal use. Although other group members often
respect these unspoken boundaries by not using
computers that are regularly used by others, these rules
are impossible to uphold when all of the other
computers are occupied.
Another serious problem is lack of storage space on our
computers. Many of the group members have huge files that
they must store somewhere, but the disk space on the
computers is limited. Some of my friends have spent
hours, or even days, looking around for empty storage
space on the different computers and transferring their
large files to that space. This is a terrible waste of
time, since it has nothing to do with the content of
the research.
The group cannot afford to keep on buying new computers
for all of the members every few years. Even when the
group is given grant money by governmental
organizations and private companies, the money is often
earmarked for a specific purpose.
Fortunately, our group has recently received a grant to
buy computers, and all of the members got together to
vote on how we wanted to use that money.
Some people preferred to concentrate on getting more
storage space, some wanted lots of standard PCs so that
all members could be guaranteed computer space, some
wanted fewer, better computers that could be used for our
heavy-duty research programs, others wanted a
centralized computer (a small supercomputer) with
lots of cheap terminals connected to that computer.
It was not easy, but the group has settled on buying
10 high-powered computers and a very large, centralized
disk for storage. Some of them have arrived at our lab
and have been installed in the computer rooms.
This has been very exciting, since many of the old
computers were cutting-edge workstations when they were
bought, but now they are many times slower than the
cheapest PCs on the market. As my adviser was carrying
out one of the old computers, he reminisced that the
computer had cost $40,000 (¥4,280,000). The new computers
cost only $4,000 (¥428,000).
It's common for people to say things like "When I was
a child, an apple cost three cents!!" to signal the
passing of the years. What he said was exactly the
opposite, but the effect was the same.
Shukan ST: June 16, 2000
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