Agenda for the ITC-Research Computing Management Meeting
December 18, 2006 at 10:30AM
2015 Ivy Road, 2nd Floor Conference Room

Members: Alice, Hamp, Jim, Joe S., Mark, Mike, Robin, Terry, Tim S., Tom S., Tim T.
Chair: Tim T.
Recorder: Alice Howard

I. Corrections to minutes from last meeting on December 14, 2006? (Minutes not available yet)

II. Old Business:

• Proposal for allocating $150K hardware funds
  • Agreed to NOT renew Birch maintenance contract for another year, rather may have to let nodes die as equipment fails if parts not available (e.g., can't find these older myrinet card anywhere), expect at most 2 or 3 nodes to have such failures.
  • 24 to 36 infiniband cluster (for fine-grained parallel) to replace birch,
  • PLUS 1 or 2 very large memory computers (not clusters) - 4Way CPU with 32 GB memory, with Linux OS to replace "athena". Requires 64-bit kernal

• Two Proposals for "buy-in" to the cluster, both new one and existing dogwood. One gives priority to running jobs anytime you want by dedicating X purchased nodes to exclusive use of the researcher. The other gives priority queue access to the entire cluster. Draft proposal of these two is detailed at: http://holmes.itc.virginia.edu/ResNotes/cluster-purchase.html

• Any update on conversion to authenticate to Eservices via Kerberos for Unix logins/connections to blue.unix, HSM & Longtmp? (AKA Phase 2 of Netbadge CDP).
  • This transition will involve a major user education issue – especially for blue.unix users.
  • No timeline for this project yet – it has to wait until after the password synchronization web site is up.
  • ftp to blue.unix is being phased out, ITC-Service Transitions CDP working on schedule.
• Infrastructure Supporting Research Task Force (https://www1.seas.virginia.edu/itrtf/). (Maillist is itrtf@virginia.edu)
  • CI-TEAM NSF proposal funded. Course has a time (MWF, 9-10) and course number (CS494 Computational Mathematics), fully enrolled (40+ undergrads, mostly 3rd & 4th year, mix of E-School disciplines, not all CS.
  • UVa's participation in ORNL's response to NSF RFP for next generation/iteration of Supercomputing Center . The full proposal is due on 2/2/07.
• Update on longtmp and HSM upgrades? (HSM scheduled for next spring07 semester)
  • Longtmp switched to NetApp - more disk space now. Snapshot frequency should be?
• SURA survey request- TimT. will contact Phil about pulling together group, possibly by email.
• At Dec 14 meeting, agreed that TimT. would contact Elec.Engineering about droppping the 8 Ultra60s in E225 and ITC no longer having a presence in E225 after Spring 2007 semester. We are willing to transfer the Ultra60s to Elec Engineering if they want them. Will put a one or two each of Linux, Sun and Macintosh workstations in ResComp Lab in Clark.
• EnvSci request to get nodes from Aspen cluster. Agreed 12/14 to have TimT. meet with EnvSci faculty coordinator of LSP making request to see if other ways we can meet needs generating this request.

III. New Business:

• Any other Items?

IV. Adjourn by 12:00 and next meeting

• Next Scheduled Meeting of ITC ResComp Standing Committee: Monday, January 29th, 10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #220.
  
  Please send suggestions, additions, corrections to: Tim Tolson or Alice Howard
  

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