Mr Jake Carroll1
1The University Of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
The COVID-19 pandemic represented a major disruption to society. As governments grappled with the complexity and severity of the problem, industries that powered global economies struggled with supply and demand, driven by a world that “stayed home”.
This presentation discusses the strategic and tactical approaches that were taken to navigate UQ’s Research Computing Centre (UQ RCC) through some of the challenges the pandemic created. In focus will be the impact of silicon supply chain failures while trying to build storage, supercompute, network and cloud platforms.
As a solution to these failures, we will outline several unorthodox vendor and logistics management techniques, legal and contract negotiation methods, some newer forms of risk analysis and calculation, and partnership arrangements. We will demonstrate that despite availability issues, there are ways to make operations that demand complex and cutting-edge systems still tractable.
We will quantify global events that went on to cause supply chain issues, overlaying a macroeconomic model to show where and when these events had an impact on our ability to deliver infrastructure. This exercise will reveal unintended causes and effects for the supply chain that provide us further insight into exactly why disruption occurs in the silicon supply chain and importantly, how to counter for it.
The conclusion of the presentation summarises how, as these events happened, we used these signals and their impact on global markets to determine what to do next so that UQ RCC could continue to deliver, rather than being unable to service research and scientific demand.
Biography:
Jake Carroll is currently the Chief Technology Officer of the University of Queensland Research Computing Centre. He has spent almost 18 years in research and advanced computing in a variety of roles, from technical support in scientific research institutes, through to lead-architect of systems and now as a CTO. Jake has consulted in various industries including commercial, corporate, health and defence. He serves on several governance boards across different sectors as strategic advisory.
Jake loves and cares about the enablement of scientific research. His passion and drive come from the opportunity to help society progress through the judicious and careful use of advanced computing.
Jake lives in Brisbane, Australia with his wife, three children, two guinea pigs, three gold fish, a cat with some entitlement issues and a blue-tongue lizard.