Governance

I now come to what I believe to be the most serious single aspect that contributed to the demise of the JVNC: governance. The governance, as I perceive it, was defective in three separate domains, each defective in its own right but all contributing to the primary failure, which was the governance of the CSC. The three domains I refer to are the universities, NSF, and the consortium itself.

Part of the problem was that the expectations of almost all of the players far exceeded the possible realities. With the exception of the Director of NSF, there was hardly a person directly or indirectly involved in the governance of the JVNC who had any experience as an operator of such complex facilities as the supercomputing centers represented. Almost all of the technical expertise was as end users. This was true for the NSF OASC and for the technical representatives on the Board of Directors of the consortium. The expertise, hard work, maturation, and planning needed for multi-million-dollar computer acquisitions were unknown to this group. Their expectations both in time and in performance levels attainable at the start-up time of the center were totally unrealistic.

At one point during the course of the first year, when difficulties with ETA meeting its commitments became apparent, the consortium

negotiated the acquisition of state-of-the-art equipment from an alternate vendor. To move along expeditiously, the plan included acquiring a succession of two similar but incompatible supercomputing systems from that vendor, bringing them up, networking them, educating the users, and bringing them down in sequence—all over a nine-month period! This was to be done in parallel with the running of the CYBER 205, which was then to be the ETA interim system—all of this with the minuscule staff at JVNC. At a meeting where these plans were enunciated to NSF, the Director of NSF very vocally expressed his consternation of and disbelief in the viability of the proposal. The OASC staff, the actual line managers of the centers, had no sense of the difficulty of the process being proposed.

At a meeting of the board of the consortium, the board was frustrated by the denial of this alternate approach that had by then been promulgated by NSF. A senior member of the OASC, who had participated in the board meeting but had not understood the nuances of the problem, when given the opportunity to make clear the issues involved, failed to do so, thereby allowing to stand misconceptions that were to continue to plague the JVNC. I believe that incident, which was one of many, typified a failure in governance on the part of NSF's management of the JVNC Cooperative Agreement.

With respect to the consortium itself, the Executive Committee, which consisted of the small group of people who had initiated the JVNC proposal, insisted on managing the activities as they did their own individual research grants. On a number of occasions, the board was admonished by the nontechnical board members to allow the president to manage the center. At no point did that happen during the formation of the JVNC.

These are my perceptions of the first year of operation of the JVNC. I do not have first-hand information about the situation during the remaining years of the JVNC. However, leaving aside the temporary management provided by a senior Princeton University administrator on a number of occasions, the succession of three additional presidents of the consortium over the next three years surely supports the premise that the problems were not fixed.

Since NSF was not able to do its job adequately in its oversight of the consortium, where were the university presidents during this time? The universities were out of the picture because they had delegated their authority to their representatives on the board. In one instance, the president of Princeton University did force a change in the leadership of

the Board of Directors to try to fix the problem. Unfortunately, that action was not coupled to a simultaneous change of governance that was really needed to fix the problem. One simple fix would have been to rotate the cast of characters through the system at a fairly rapid clip, thereby disengaging the inside group that had initiated the JVNC.

Although the other centers had to deal with the same NSF management during the early days, their governance typically was in better hands. Therefore, they were in a better position to accommodate the less-than-expert management within the NSF. Fortunately, by the middle of the second year, the NSF had improved its position. A "rotator" with much experience in operating such centers was assigned to the OASC. Once there was a person with the appropriate technical knowledge in place at the OASC, the relationship between the centers and the NSF improved enormously.