Man, this is an interesting conversation, keep it going! George's comments made me want to chime in here too . . .
George Estes wrote: > Just my personal opinion, but I think > many of the sites falling off the AG wagon are sites that can't, or > won't for whatever reason, put forth the effort necessary to make the > AG work well for them. The AG is perceived as relatively high-maintenance. Whether or not this perception is accurate (a whole OTHER conversation), the perception itself does influence people's decisions. Anecdotal evidence about this . . . at BU we've always had a lot of requests for AG usage from outside our university. People at other local universities and companies come to us, rather than setting up their own nodes. Last year we started charging fees for usage, in part because the volume of requests was high enough to be significantly impacting our workload (and it's hard to justify spending that much time supporting other people's meetings, without any reimbursement to cover the cost of that time). Sometimes it makes a lot of sense for people to pay for using our node, rather than building one themselves. If you need a node that seats 10, you need it next month, and you don't have appropriate networking or hardware, it may be a lot easier and smarter to send us a check and use our node, than it would be to try to get all that work done in time (just *think* of the administrative nightmares some of us go through to get appropriate networking!). But sometimes the scenario doesn't look anything like that. Sometimes it's one person who needs to join a meeting, and they're from an institution with plenty of bandwidth. I often think they'd be better off spending an hour and $150 to set up a Personal Node for whoemever needs to connect to a meeting -- and my suggestion that they consider this option usually is not well-received. > And then there are probably some sites that > got involved during the initial excitement but now don't have enough > remote collaborations to support the Access Grid. Initial excitement and, in many cases, initial funding. A small number of sites were funded as a testbed, to set up AG nodes in 1999 and 2000 through the National Computational Science Alliance. Since the Alliance has been gone for a while now (meaning that both that money and that particular bully-pulpit are gone), it would be interesting to know how many of those nodes are still being used at least, say, five times a month. We were one of the 1999 sites, and I know our original AG node is still pretty darn busy! Cheers, Jennifer
