The Vice Provost for Information Technology Impact Awards recognize the efforts of IT professionals at Penn State who have taken a leadership role and have provided outstanding achievement in the areas of IT collaboration, out-of-the-box innovation, and resource responsibility.  This April, Chuck Pavloski, Chad Bahrmann, Jeff Wolfe (College of EMS), and Brian Katyl (ITS) received the Vice Provost Information Technology Resource Responsibility Award for their efforts to implement the BigFix/Computer Lab Management project in Meteorology and provide valuable feedback to staff in Information Technology Services (ITS).

Left to right: Chad Bahrmann, Chuck Pavloski and Jeff Wolfe

BigFix is a system that when deployed, helps to conserve power while maintaining or increasing the manageability of the affected computers.  Using suggestions put forward by Jeff Wolfe in consultation with Brian Katyl’s Computer Lab Management group at ITS, Chuck and Chad deployed upwards of 100 machines in the newly renovated Joel N. Myers Weather Center using the BigFix/CLM combination.  They are now working to deploy BigFix/CLM on all administrative, faculty, and student machines throughout the Department of Meteorology, which will impact about 500 machines on which 120 faculty, staff, and graduate students work.

Through their efforts, students will have a more uniform experience in our labs and IT classrooms, and the research and academic missions within meteorology will be more productive as a result of stable and much more easily managed computing platforms.