Letter from Boston Group Resources By MASAKO YAMADA	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
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。

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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