Information Technology
A CONVERSATION WITH ADAM STONE
Adam Stone is the interim Chief Information Officer at the Laboratory. He joined the Lab in 2004, working on Lab and Department of Energy (DOE)-wide policy issues around computing, IT, and cyber security. After a stint at DOE in Washington, D.C. as an advisor to the Secretary of Energy on cyber security working under the previous LBL CIO, he took on the Deputy CIO role working on collaboration tools, outreach, and scientific computing. Adam came to Berkeley Lab from UC Berkeley where his dissertation focused on the intersection between research/academic institutions and regulators. His fieldwork took place over nine years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked with LANL leadership to understand regulatory interfaces around the post-cold war nuclear weapons complex.
How does IT support the Lab’s mission?
Computing and IT are critical parts of scientific discovery. Whether we are providing high speed networking to support instruments and experiments, high performance computing for modeling and simulation, collaboration tools to enable our researchers to work with their colleagues around the Lab and around the world, or support services to keep systems running, IT is an enabler - and sometimes an accelerator - of scientific work. We also work with our scientific colleagues to secure that research by creating a unique environment. And, of course, IT also provides everything from enterprise business systems to telephones to keep the Lab running smoothly.
What are IT’s top 3 or 4 priorities today?
We’re always focused on how we best meet the computing needs of the scientific community but this is a particularly important area for us right now. In September, Mike chartered the “Future Berkeley Lab Computing Working Group”, led by Jonathan Carter with representatives from IT and each science area, to develop a vision for the services, support, and collaborations the Lab needs to provide a transformative computing environment for our researchers. The group has been meeting bi-weekly to develop this vision and is currently engaged in data gathering within the science areas to further understand requirements and unmet needs. We should be wrapping up those efforts in late summer, and then we’ll be focused on getting leadership input and eventually, prioritizing and implementing those recommendations.
Of course, we’re also spending a lot of time thinking about the future of work. From our perspective, the Lab was in a much better position to transition to remote work than many of our peer institutions, both due to IT’s long-term focus on “work from anywhere, anytime” as well as the flexibility and savvy of our Lab community. Now, we’re focused on what’s next. From conference room technologies that try to make remote participants into full participants in meetings, to collaboration tools and practices that support hybrid work, we’re working on lots of initiatives to keep the Lab at the forefront and support whatever modalities of work our community ends up pursuing. We’re also working on security tools and changes that make keeping systems secure easy whether they are on or off Lab networks. Right now, we’re working on the LabTech Demo Space on the 2nd floor of building 50B, which will be a showplace for conference room and other hybrid-support technologies. And we’re putting the finishing touches on upgrades to our telephone system to fully support remote workers with their Lab extension on their computers and mobile devices.
Who do you partner with at the Lab to be successful?
IT is fundamentally a service organization, so partnerships are a core part of our operations. Over the past two years, we’ve put additional resources behind these collaborations with the building out of our ScienceIT Consulting Team. This group works directly with researchers to architect computing and data solutions for scientific projects across the Laboratory. They can help match research needs to services whether those services are provided by IT, a user facility, another agency or institution, or a cloud provider. Recently, we’ve been spending quite a bit of time with the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) as we work to support their upcoming cluster-computing needs. We’ve also mostly wrapped our efforts to support the collaboration needs of the current Cosmic Microwave Background project (CMB-S4), leveraging the Lab’s existing collaboration tools, as that project moves its home to the Lab.
Of course, we partner with our Ops and Directorate colleagues as well, whether it’s working on policies for the future of work, implementing enterprise systems to support functional needs, or just generally providing the computing support that makes it possible for the Lab to function.