Harvard Medical School

His forecast: Cloudy, with a chance of downtime

adamg — Mon, 16 May 2011 11:14:04 +0000

John Halamka, in charge of network computing at both Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, considers recent public cloud outages (from Amazon to Blogger), says he remains optimistic about the basic concept, in part because:

Problems on centralized cloud architecture that is homogenous, well documented, and highly staffed will be more rapidly resolved than problems in distributed, poorly staffed one-off installations.

He describes some of the issues his own campus clouds have had over the past year, including:

HMS has clustered thousands of computing cores together to create a highly robust community resource connected to a petabyte of distributed storage nodes. In theory is should be invincible. In practice it went down. A user with limited high performance computing experience launched a poorly written job to 400 cores in parallel that caused a core dump every second contending for the same disk space. Storage was overwhelmed and went offline for numerous applications.

Who tried to poison the pathologists at Harvard Medical School?

adamg — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:21:24 +0000

The Herald reports six scientists and students drank poisoned coffee from a single-serve coffee machine in August.

Just because you're smart doesn't mean you have a lick of common sense

adamg — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:11:10 +0000

Paul Levy, CEO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, wishes to address students at Harvard's medical and public-health schools who are riding their bikes to school now that the weather is nice: Put your damn helmet on and stop riding like a moron:

Today's quiz: What do we call a Harvard student who rides a bicycle in the wrong lane without a helmet?

Answer: An organ donor.

What it's like to dissect a cadaver

adamg — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:14:22 +0000

Kristin Huang is a first-year student at Harvard Medical School. First year means dissection and it's pretty rough (and then, the next day, even rougher). Definitely NOT for the squeamish (her subject lines begin with "Dismemberment" and "Mutiliation"), but it can give you some idea of what doctors in training have to go through.