CELS Systems Newsletter – 2025-04-07
Hey, everyone! It’s been over a year since I’ve done one of these, and I’m so overdue there’s no way I’ll cover everything new and exciting without writing a tome that would intimidate someone who found Stephen King’s The Stand a light read on a Sunday afternoon.
Instead, I’m just going to focus on some important changes in the pipeline and take a look at what the team looks like these days after some recent changes.
Slack changes
Due to some requirements from various facets of lab management and oversight, we need to migrate our existing Slack workspaces to a new tier called Slack Enterprise Grid. Without going into a lot of lower-level details, the very short story is that we’ll have a little ecosystem called the CELS Slack Grid that will include a number of already existing workspaces, plus the ability to stand up new workspaces trivially. We’ll even be able to support Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) on select workspaces.
But in order to keep costs under control (as you can imagine, this isn’t a cheaper plan), as well as add required MFA logins, we’ll need to change how people login and will start using CELS GCE logins instead of ANL SSO. This change will happen sometime this summer, and more details will come as we approach that. Right now, there’s no change you need to make, but I wanted to set the stage for the new model. As we get closer to implementing the required changes, we’ll be communicating with you on what needs to be done on your end to make sure you keep access.
Another change coming is that due to using CELS Accounts, after the move Argonne employees will no longer be able to automatically join the workspaces. There will be an approval process for new accounts, as they’ll be tied to GCE projects. The very short version of this change will be CELS employees as well as non-CELS employees who are actively collaborating on a CELS-led project will be approved, and others will need to either join/switch to limited-access guests or provide a project code for their account. We’ll send more detailed instructions on that as we get the pieces in place to implement it.
Getting Help
If you’re looking for support for a computing issue, please make sure you use our ticketing system to ensure your issue will be seen and tracked. [email protected] goes directly to our team, and they’ll triage issues and reassign as appropriate. This now also includes requests for our CELS Cyber Team (see more below). If you have questions about the security of an application, service, or a change you want to make, send it our way and the Cyber Team will take it on.
The Slack channel #cels-systems-helpdesk is also an option for realtime debugging, and not just with the Systems team but other helpful folks who hang out in there as well. Just note this is a supplement to making a ticket, not a replacement. Things can get lost in scrollback and we don’t want you thinking something was seen when it wasn’t.
Lastly, as much as I would enjoy helping solve problems and answer questions, pinging me directly in Slack or sending me email is not likely going to get a timely response these days. There’s more on that below.
Meet the Team
We’ve had a number of additions (and, sadly, departures) over the past year. You can find the current group make-up here.
Looking at Mark’s team, High Performance and Institutional Computing (HPIC), you can see some changes there. Over the past year, both Stas Sergienko and John Roberts left the lab to pursue other big opportunities, and while I’m sad to see them go, I’m excited for their new gigs.
Brad Fritz moved into LCRC to backfill for Stas, and we just now filled John’s spot on the HPIC team as well. Please join me in welcoming Phil Regier to the team! Phil’s worked as an HPC Systems Engineer for some time, including stints at NASA Ames, Suse, Sandia, and Livermore. He’s going to be a great contributor to the team, and his extensive knowledge and background will help ease the sting of losing John.
When you look at Anthony’s Research Computing (RC) side of things, you’ll also notice some recent changes. First of all, we had to replace Brad’s effort on the team, and a couple of weeks ago George Burns joined the RC team as Brad’s replacement to help us improve our capabilities and skills in cloud computing (both private and public).
Over the past year, we’ve been shoring up the CELS Cyber Team. After the departure of our previous Cyber lead, I took over leading that group and Jeff Neel moved into CELS from ALCF last year, then earlier this year Jess Garrett also moved over and joins us as an Application Security Engineer. To round things out, a couple of weeks back we welcomed the newest member of the team, Matt Gill. Matt will be assisting in ALCF, but also working with the CELS Systems team on Cyber issues and projects facing the other CELS divisions. I’m super happy to have them all on this team, and I’m confident Anthony’s leadership of this team is going to have them excel.
You’ll also notice we’ve carved out front line support and other services into a new group with a new leader, Michel Bedard. Michel joined us at the end of March as our new IT Service Operations Manager. Previously, Michel was a Technical Support Director for Oracle, and is really excited about joining Argonne, and that excitement is mutual! I look forward to the improvements he’ll bring us and I’m sure you’re going to see positive results in our team’s capability and performance.
We also just recently added an assistant Data Center Manager, Todd Kodo. He joins us from his most recent position as a Data Center Facility Manager for CBRE managing a different property than TCS. He’ll be helping Bill out with all things Data Center related, and has already made a huge difference!
The group is finally fully staffed. But, oh yeah, that can’t stand, so there’s one other thing…
The future of the team
By now, I’m going to presume you’ve seen the announcement of my new role as Strategic Initiatives Technical Director for CELS. It’s a very different and exciting role for me that I’m champing at the bit to get into. As I ramp up on this new role and spin down as IT Director, I’m going to be significantly less available on any IT support issues. I’m going to wrap up current projects (such as the Slack renewal) and do my best to carry what I can until my replacement as the CELS IT Director is chosen.
I’ve got every confidence in the team and the group leaders we’ve got in place, and I’m sure things are going to run quite smoothly. Any success I have enjoyed is because of this team, a team that’s been built over years of collaboration, sharing ideas, and giving people the ability to excel in their areas of strength. The only thing that will change is the goofy smiling face at the top of that org chart. I’m exceptionally grateful to everyone in Systems for being as talented and researcher-focused as they are, and I want to assure you the fact that it’ll be someone else heading that team is not going to change the mission.
This might not be appropriate for an operational newsletter, but hey, it’s my last one. I want to give a posthumous shout out to my man, Devin Hodge. He really helped me in so many ways, and helped me become even better at this job by his attitude towards the mission, his trust in his people, and genuinely inspiring me to be better. I miss him every day and I wish he could see this, because I know it would just tickle him to pieces. Love you, buddy!
Thanks, everyone.