Mark Elies was an Akamai intern for two summers.  In 2003 he worked with the Maui High Performance Computing Center and then returned to the Akamai program for a second year and worked at Akimeka.  He received an A.S. degree from the Electronic and Computer Engineering Technology program last year and is currently working as a MALT intern, on an image data base for the web.  Mark plans to continue on to a university to get a degree in Computer Science or Engineering.

Home Island: Maui

High School:

Institution when accepted: Maui Community College

Akamai Project: Configuration Management Study

Project Site: Akimeka LLC

Mentor: Scott Oshita

Project Abstract:

Configuration Management (CM) is the discipline for managing the evolution of a system during all stages of development.  The responsibilities of CM include configuration identification, control, and auditing. One of the two tasks at hand was to hand check the network, hardware, and software configurations, compare them with current configuration diagrams and lists, determine which was the preferred and correct the other. All changes were documented and the current diagrams and lists were updated to include more information about the configurations.  I also created an image database of all new equipment. The next task was to determine a working configuration for a system of hardware that had no previous documentation. This included ascertaining what the components do, determining their compatibility, drawing up a schematic of the connections, and writing up a requirements list of what is needed. With these steps of configuration management, someone new obtaining this equipment would be able to reproduce the configuration and would be saved the trouble of reengineering this system.