Distributed consulting in a distributed environment

Project Athena is one of the world's largest centrally-administered distributed computer environments, linking more than 1,000 workstations. Students and faculty use workstations scattered across MIT's 146-acre campus, in public clusters, private offices, and labs. Users can login to any Athena workstation on campus to access their files, mail, software, and even other systems, through the network.

To serve our widespread network of workstations and more than 9000 users, with a staff of only 20 part-time consultants and 20 part-time volunteers, we've developed an efficient, distributed consulting system to match our distributed computing system.

We've developed a number of tools to adapt to the fact that users, consultants, and other members of the Athena organization may be logged in anywhere on campus. We use Athena's Zephyr messaging system to locate, communicate with and coordinate with, in real time, all consultants and Network Services and Systems Support staff members. Using OLC (presented at the October '89 SIGUCCS), the on-line consulting system software, users and consultants can contact each other from any part of campus.

To handle the expected 45,000 questions this year, we've modified OLC so that consultants can answer more than one question simultaneously. We also offer an answers system, accessible by users and consultants, providing answers to common questions. As the system or users' use of the systems changes, we can update these answers instantaneously.

Our OLC software has been adapted for other uses. Some courses now use an “on-line teaching assistant” version (OLTA) which allows students to ask course-related questions. Instructors can review OLTA conversations to uncover common problems that have occurred.

This session will cover our distributed consulting system as it exists and changes we're making to meet our ever-increasing load and to handle the integration of other systems into the Athena environment.