Agenda for the ITC-Research Computing Management Meeting
March 28, 2005 at 10:00AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room 220

Members: Alice, Hamp, Jim, Terry, Tim S., Tom S., Tim T.
Chair: Tim T.
Recorder: Alice Howard

I. Corrections to minutes from last meeting on January 19, 2005?

II. Old Business:

• Cluster projects:
  • "Condo" Cluster: (cypress.itc)126 nodes, Dual CPU Opteron's (1.8 Ghz) 2MB memory, 80GB hard drive. Will have its own disk storage array as new ones with birch and aspen. Will operate as 32-bit cluster for at least first year.
    • Have four researchers participating: Leo Zhigilei (lz2n) - 8 nodes w/ ETF $; Jeff Shabanowitz/Dina Bai (Chemistry)- 8 nodes; Phil Parrish/Rich Gregory - 4 nodes;
      • Matt Neurock has committed and sent PTAO for four (4) nodes not certain yet.
    • Promised we'd have it in user-production mode by end of March. Now thinking it'll be end of April?
    • "Condo Cluster" program details preserved at: http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/itc-clusters/itc-linux-cluster-purchase-dec04.pdf.
  • Temp space for cypress - storage array like Aspen & Birch's
• Proposal for Linux cluster support as 'for-fee' service.
  • Need guidelines for how to handle support for researchers who don't purchase cluster support but expect assistance and guidance from ITC for their cluster.
• Linux license server, "linux.license.virginia.edu".
  • Timeline for coming available?
  • What software products license will be served from it?
• New "disk wedge" leasing rates.
• Computer Sciences "grid clustering" proposal headed by Andrew Grimshaw. He can come any Monday around 11:15 AM. Do we want to meet in March to hear what he's doing with this project?
  

III. New Business:

• SEAS request for 30 or so nodes added to or part of cypress cluster for faculty recruitment.
• What is our cluster downtime policy, procedure and practice? Aspen front-end downtime weekend of March 4-6. Went down sometime Friday night/Saturday AM. Still couldn't login Monday AM. Ed emailed Sunday morning that it was unavailable (automatic message from itc-backups to "systems@" on Saturday 5PM that it had been unavailable too long for backups.
  • This happened end of September 2004 where it went down Friday night and was down until Monday
    morning.
  • What will be our downtime policy and practice for cypress?
• Jim Oberhauser's complaints about aspen.itc queue management and practice.
  • Users allowed to get 18 nodes (36 CPUs) for parallel jobs and 24 nodes serial.
  • Fair Share scheduling makes it possible for longer job to run before shorter job based on amount user's job have using cluster recently.
• Jim Jokl's email about CS having cluster our users, particularly "cypress" users can use for awhile
  • Who's contact? Do they use PBSPro? What's setup, etc.?
    
• Timeline and priority order of all these equipment rollouts (oak,cypress, blue.unix,longtmp disks, linux.license, etc.).
• blue.unix upgrade of nodes to new 64-bit nodes and new version of OS. ITC-Transitions CDP is tracking as well. Testing plan and timeline?
• Move of remaining FlexLM / other license managers from jeeves.itc to appropriate xxx.license.virginia.edu
  • Already moved S-PLUS, Matlab Classroom, TotalView, & IMSL to aix.license.virginia.edu, right?
  • Moved to linux.license? And Moved to solaris.license?.

V. Adjourn by 11:15AM and next meeting

• Meeting Andrew Grimshaw with rest of ResComp Standing Committee at 11:15 today to discuss Andrew's Grid Computing project.
• Next Scheduled Meeting of Standing Committee group: Monday, April 25th, 10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #102
• Next Scheduled Meeting of ITC ResComp Management team: Monday, May 23rd, 10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #220
  
  
  Suggestions, additions, corrections to: Tim Tolson or Alice Howard
  

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