Summary of discussions concerning ICT White Paper held by Physics Computing Committee on 8th June 2020 ====================================================================================================== General notes -------------- 1. Clearly, there are parts of ICT that would benefit from reform and there are some positive aspects to the suggested model such as, budgetary responsibility being devolved to the product management, restructuring some of the higher management that would be beneficial. However, examples of problematic projects tend to be on the administrative/managerial side of the college (SIMP, Banner and ICIS were mentioned) rather than on the core departmental activities of teaching and research. The statement both in the green paper and the white paper that there is a lack of trust between the customers and ICT may or may not be true of the administrative parts of college but is certainly true of the Physics Department. On the contrary, physics find ICT to be both helpful and very responsive to our teaching and research requests. 2. It appears that the writers of the white paper have not grasped some of the essentially diversity of needs of the activities of a university compared to a business. The statement that ICT supports "anything and everything" is often a reflection of the reality needed for research. A world class scientific instrument does not stop being world class just because the OS on which its drivers were written is no longer supported. This is true of individual instruments in the lab and of wider international collaborations. Space missions exemplify this with the recently ended Cassini probe being a prime example. This was a two decade space flight that, towards the end of its life, relied on computers running out of date operating systems. Without the excellent support of ICT valuable data would have been lost to humanity. [RICH, PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT THIS PART IS FACTUALLY CORRECT]. There are many other examples and in general collaborators in "Big Science" projects are constrained to run in the environment dictated by the collaboration, in practice this can mean an environment dictated by ESA, ESO, CERN or any other large project/telescope. This cannot be dictated by ICT for their convenience. ICT have recognised this and responded well to the needs of the research communities. If ICT are to stop this support it will inevitably result in a shadow ICT funded by scraps from research grants (explicitly something ICT want to avoid - for good reason). 3. The white paper claims to be based on extensive consultation with staff in departments (explicitly interviews with HoDs) across college and senior ICT members. To our knowledge nobody from withing physics has been consulted - certainly not the HoD or the Physics-ICT computing contact. We find this unusual as Physics is one of the largest users of computing within Imperial College. Senior members of ICT also tell us that their consultation was rather perfunctory (however that is a matter internal to ICT). 4. It was generally felt that attempting such a major reform during a period of lockdown when all people and systems are stressed is most politely described as foolhardy. 5. The workings of the entire department are dependent on the support staff provided by ICT and we have great concerns as to how this support network will function with such a drop in the headcount of support staff. 6. The speed at which the reforms are being driven through means that they are bound to cause significant disruption at pretty much the very worst possible time. Specific matters ----------------- The core business of the Physics Department is teaching and research. Members of the Physics Department have grave concerns as to what this reorganisation will mean for both. Teaching --------- 1. We are about to enter a multi mode teaching environment. With some students being remote and others (at least partially) in college. ICT support staff and especially the Digital Partner roles are key to us being able to develop these environments successfully. There is a great deal of knowledge of how the teaching is performed in the different department distilled into the support staff who interact with them. This is extremely valuable as the methods for teaching each subject vary greatly because of the differing nature of the subjects. To be deliberately loosing the support staff with this knowledge at this time is at best foolhardy and might be considered to be insane. The existing support staff have already proven their worth through things like the implementation of remote exams. Here a solution specific to physics was required and worked out between physics academics and ICT support staff. 2. Failure to deliver good multi mode teaching carries a huge reputational risk and yet we are removing the very people who have the understanding to be able to deliver this just at the time that they would be most essential. This is simply the wrong time to be contemplating this level of restructuring from a teaching point of view. This is bound to cause very significant disruption at a time when stability and sustained development is needed. 3. The teaching machines in physics have a complex set of software installed, that is required for teaching various courses and modules. This needs support and maintenance. Again we are concerned how the reduction in support staff will effect this. 4. With there being potentially large numbers of remote students with a variety of remote access problems we are concerned the reduced number of support staff will not be able cope with the expected large number of queries. 5. The AV support team say that with their numbers reduced they will not be able to provide the expected level of support. Often support from this team is needed very urgently as there is a lecture theatre full of students not being educated as there is a temporary AV problem in need of repair. Research --------- Over recent year the Research Computing Service (RCS) has provided a coherent set of services including: - High Performance Computing (HPC) - The Research Data Service (RDS) - storage compliant with the needs of the research communities and their their funding agencies - Research Software Engineers (RSEs) to develop code required by research groups. - Training for those needing to use HPC resources for their research. RCS has successfully weaned people out of the shadow ICT into using mainstream services. This has been a significant success. Previously groups were reliant on some fraction of a postdoc's time to run the computing for that group as well as write the code needed for the analysis/simulation. These postdocs were generally not computing experts and so a great many inefficiencies were introduced. When the project end and the postdoc has moved on there was no continuity of support for the data. RCS have made great strides into fixing all these problems. RCS has also provided a sufficiently large HPC platform for the users to develop simulations either to get the scientific results that they need or to be able to show that their code scales sufficiently well to be run on nation and international resources such as ARCHER or PRACE. For all these reasons RCS has been viewed as a jewel in the crown of ICT. It is also an area where the product model works well and the RCS team were expecting to have minor internal restructuring to conform to the product model but to otherwise remain as a single coherent entity. However, under the current plan they are to be completely disbanded with their functions being absorbed into a general pools associated with research products. This will result loss of expertise and the inevitable re-emergence of a shadow ICT. While this will save money within ICT it will cost very much more in the individual research groups and result in poor research outcomes. The RCS Manager is currently unable to promise resources beyond the end July 2020 - this is not an acceptable state of affairs. Networking is important to some research groups in physics. With HEP being the largest single user of network bandwidth in the college (and one of the largest on the whole UK academic network). ICT networking have been extremely supportive to all our research needs. For example Imperial was the first academic institution to have a 100Gb/s connection and because of the strength of the networking group was amongst the first to be able to provide research area specific VRFs - a model that JISC is now planning to role out across a wide number of subject areas. With the networking team being halved in size it is extremely doubtful that Imperial could even aspire to maintain this current leading role. We hope that these notes are useful.