Agenda for the ITC-Research Computing Management Meeting
June 7, 2007 at 4:00 PM
2015 Ivy Road, 1st Floor Conference Room

 

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

I. Connection Question: Why did you choose to attend today (rather than wait for end of June)?

II. Corrections to minutes from last meeting on April 30, 2007?

III. Old Business:

• Impending Cluster rollout and retirement
  • Bought 12 compute nodes and 1 head node: Xeon 5160 (80w) 3.0 GHz, 4MB cache, 32GB (8 x 4 DIMMS) 160 GB HD (mirrored) nodes for new cluster to replace Athena. Have operational by mid-summer.
  • Name for this new cluster "e" name.
  • Retire birch by June 4.
  • Retire Athena by July 2.
• Genomics might want to buy in to cluster – but infiniband type cluster not appropriate for them. They need large memory computers. Did Tom & Hamp meet with them?
  
• Jim & Hamp will come up with rate for buying "priority" time on dogwood cluster.
• Tim's group working on testing existing cluster applications on 64-bit test cluster and making table of what's 64-bit, what's 32-bit and any issues, concerns for each package. Will have testing done and report ready by end of June.
• Tim/RCS staff will do review of other institutions queuing and cluster purchase programs in preperation for public forum on queuing policies. (by August xx?)


• Linux Clusters: Birch, Cedar, Dogwood - any issues, concerns or upcoming updates/changes?
  • Cluster upgrades this summer, depending on when next version of ROCKS released (RHEL 5 out) otherwise fall break.
• Any update on conversion to authenticate to Eservices via Kerberos for Unix logins/connections for Blue.unix? (AKA Phase 2 of Netbadge CDP and "unified password" web site).
• VT-UVa IT Collaboration. Had meeting with Andrew G., telephone conference with VT. Collab site: "UVa VT IT Collab" One part is around HPC and Computational Science. Going forward with UVa-VT Computational Science bootcamp this summer, Andrew Grimshaw spearheading. Preliminary syllabus has been drafted.

IV. New Business:

• Proposal for Software Licensing for Computational Science and Engineering
• Any news, information from E-School? SURA? Other organizations?
• At future meeting this summer, when all are present: In light of our familiarity with collaborative model of communities, consider for next meeting, consider using some of these tools. We cannot be a "community" but many of the tools of community and powerful speaking could make the meetings more productive and enjoyable.
  • what are we about/doing?
  • establish operating principles?
  • member roles?
• Any other Items?
• Review promises and requests from this meeting.

V. Adjourn by 5:00 and next meeting

• Next Scheduled Meeting of ITC ResComp Standing Committee: Monday, June 25th, 10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #102 (First Floor Conference Room)!
  
  Please send suggestions, additions, corrections to: Tim Tolson or Alice Howard
  

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