The incumbent manages the technical support staff of one support group within CSCF, reporting to the Associate Director of CSCF. Examples of three support groups of CSCF are:
The choice of support groups may change with time, with the exception of the Research support group, which will always exist, and be distinct from the remaining groups.
The size of the group that a manager is responsible for is typically about 4 or 5. This is necessary in order to provide sufficient time for the incumbent to both
Membership in each managed group is determined primarily by compatible technical strengths of the manager and the task group members, and avoiding overloading any one manager with staff. As such, group membership may vary over time with changes in skill sets.
Under the three managers are potentially overlapping domains. For example, a group of courses or a group of research projects with similar computing needs might be designated as a domain. Thus, there might be a domain for all first-year programming courses. There might be a domain for all fourth-year courses dealing with computer architecture. There might be a domain encompassing two research groups together and a domain for another research group by itself. The domains are guided by the appropriate manager, the obvious example being the research project domains being guided by the manager responsible for research computing.
Each domain consists of one or more support specialists, chosen for their needed technical expertise. A given specialist may be in more than one domain in order to allow distribution of required technical expertise.
The Shared Infrastructure Domain overlaps with the other domains. This overlap is to allow the individual domains to share the expertise of the Shared Infrastructure Domain, to gain economies of scale.
The intention is that whenever a point of contact can't resolve a computing problem, he or she approaches someone in the appropriate domain who can resolve the problem.
The Computer Science Computing Facility (CSCF) is the primary computing support provider for the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Its mandate is to provide a leading computing and networking infrastructure to support the research, teaching, and administrative missions of the School. CSCF plans, manages, and monitors the network facilities within the School. This enhanced network capability is connected to the campus backbone network, and hence the Internet, through a single point of presence provided by IST. Services include account administration for non-CSCF owned research machines, back-up services, machine installation and setup, a secure and environmentally controlled machine room, consulting services to the School, electronic mail, web access, and local software enhancements. CSCF also provides remote distribution of software, such as mathematical text processors, scientific software, statistical packages, compilers, and editors, particularly through the MFCF-developed xhier system. IST maintains the xhier system for the wider campus community.
In response to curriculum demands within the School, CSCF centrally plans, develops, and administers instructional labs. These include special-purpose labs for computer graphics, real-time programming, networking, and distributed systems. General-purpose instructional facilities include PC-based labs (Macintosh and Windows), and thin-client labs that provide students immediate access to an array of Unix servers. Graduate students in the School are served by thin-client or PC-based systems within their offices. Students are provided Unix accounts for the duration of their academic terms. CSCF maintains its own systems and also provides hardware, software, and consulting support to faculty members and administrative staff across the School who operate their own equipment.
The Math Faculty Computing Facility (MFCF) maintains similar instructional facilities. They are physically adjacent to CSCF's, each environment provides access to the file storage of the other, and accounts for all Math Faculty students are provided on both. Furthermore, a Help Centre and a printing room are common to both environments. Therefore, CSCF unavoidably coordinates these aspects of its instructional support activities with those of MFCF.
The computing environment is constantly changing as new technologies are adopted, requiring continuous adaptation and the development of new skills. The large size of the computing environment results in non-trivial diversity, and the resulting need for integration.
Work ranges from solving day-to-day problems that affect the continuing operation of the computing environment to long-term infrastructure support projects designed to improve the computing environment as well as our ability to support and extend it as efficiently as possible.
Some additional major challenges imposed by the environment are:
- Group Management
- Given the existence of multiple managed groups, and projects and political constraints that require significant efforts spread across the groups, the incumbent must work effectively with the other Technical Managers, sharing both technical and management activities.
- Setting Priorities
- Setting appropriate priorities to balance the demands of the diverse groups within the School can be challenging, given the generally large differences between available resources and faculty expectations.
- Diversity
- The computing environment is very diverse. Although for some of the user groups it's possible to focus on specific technologies, other groups either require or demand diversity, which then increases the difficulty in maintaining required expertise, since in this environment, staff increases generally aren't planned when considering new technologies.
- Integration
- The existence of diversity demands the need for integration of the various technologies in use. Adopters of diverse technologies generally don't plan for integration, but rather assume it.
- Range of User Skill
- The "customer base" consists of groups that have widely different skills, from technically naive to extremely sophisticated. That greatly increases the difficulty in providing services suitable for all.
- The Black Box
- Many of the technologies in use are effectively "black boxes", in that internal operation is hidden or poorly documented, thereby increasing the difficulty of operation and problem diagnosis.
- Rapid Change
- The nature of computing technology is such that change is extremely rapid, sometimes on the order of months. Consequently, one cannot rely a-priori upon having specific skills or training for the task at hand. The result is an environment where the ability to train oneself is very important.
When judged practical, the incumbent explores possibilities, recognizing preferred approaches and solutions. The incumbent judges the extent to which such approaches may be practically pursued in a given situation, as opposed to using standard approaches and solutions. The incumbent uses a disciplined approach to all aspects of problem resolution.
The incumbent adopts an abstract approach to problem solutions, so as to not only be aware of appropriate solutions, but to be able to choose general, scalable solutions to problems where possible. Solutions which can benefit the campus as a whole are ideal.
The incumbent uses general principles to solve specific problems without a detailed knowledge of the systems involved.
The incumbent is directly responsible for employees within the incumbent's group, and for providing significant guidance to other technical staff engaged in projects relevant to the incumbent's areas of expertise.
The incumbent will work closely with the other Technical Managers and the Associate Director in determining appropriate recommendations for the Director.
Significant external relationships include the sharing of expertise and effort with other campus support groups that affect the School. For example, with the department of Information Systems and Technology (IST), the Mathematics Faculty Computing Facility (MFCF), and Engineering Computing (EngComp).
CSCF has 22 full-time permanent staff, and typically some co-op students and/or part-time student help. The budget is approximately $1.7M. Staff may be involved in other funding, often the result of support for research computing.
The size of the supported community varies with time, so specific numbers can only provide a rough idea of magnitude. As of Fall 2007, there were approximately
70 faculty 1700 CS undergrads 2500 other undergrads taking CS courses 260 grads 20 administrative staff
in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, aside from CSCF itself. Each of the groups has diverse support needs.
The incumbent is expected to
A minimum requirement is a Master's degree in Computer Science (or a related discipline) together with relevant experience, or a combination of education and/or experience deemed to be equivalent. The incumbent either has demonstrated management/supervisory skills, or has been judged to clearly have the potential for such. The incumbent has demonstrated commitment to the facility, the School, and the Faculty.