April 30,2007 Minutes of the ITC-Research Computing Management Meeting

Minutes for the ITC-Research Computing Management Meeting
April 30, 2007 at 10:30AM
2015 Ivy Road, 1st Floor Conference Room

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

Attending: Alice, Hamp, Jim, Joe S., Mark, Robin, Tom, Tim T.

I. Connection Question: What do you think is the best or favorite (or worst) thing about U.Va. research computing?

(Italics indicate original agenda item. Regular text indicates meeting notes)

III. Old Business: (italics indicate original agenda item text, regular text the meeting notes.)

Got a good deal from Dell – so Hamp has ordered 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. New nodes should arrive in a few weeks. Have operational in mid-summer.
Since we want to reclaim birch’s power as soon as possible, we will urge birch users to move quickly – this seems feasible as the birch users’ run times on cedar/dogwood were as good, or better, than on birch – and will try to have them moved off birch by June 1.

Since the new cluster is 64-bit, we will need the 64-bit versions of our big applications, Katherine is working on testing and creating a chart of applications and the 64-bit issue.
(from prior meetings: Tom) Genomics might want to buy in to cluster – but infiniband type cluster not appropriate for them. They need large memory computers. Hamp and Tom will reschedule a meeting with these folks.
Jim & Hamp will come up with rate for buying "priority" time on dogwood cluster.
After the semester crunch, Tim/RCS staff will do review of other institutions queuing and cluster purchase programs in preparation for public forum on queuing policies. Might aim to have the public forum in early October.

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).
Might be possible to do the upgrades over Fall break.
Prefer not to give any old birch hardware to any group (e.g. Matt Neurock’s) – so wait and see if they ask.

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). Currently stalled.
Project Implicit, PI: Brian Nosek, Psychology Department. Project description at: NIH-IPP.researchplan.B-Nosek.pdf

Tim, Hamp, Andrew Sallans & Carla Lee from Brown SEL meeting with Brian & his group this week. We may have reached the point where we cannot house any more servers.

IV. New Business:

VT-UVa IT Collaboration. Meeting on April 2nd. Collab site: "UVa VT IT Collab" One part is around HPC and Computational Science. Going forward with UVa-VT Computational Science bootcamp for faculty and grad students this summer (August), Andrew Grimshaw spearheading.

Mike, Terry, TimT, and Andrew working on this – to be hosted here – would need to reserve space on dogwood, and/or create a bootcamp queue

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, re-examining our purpose, our membership and our constituency.

Robin mentioned that the project to turn on auto-negotiation in the switching closets is done.
Hamp added that SEAS is adding more clusters limited to certain research groups.
Athena: decided to drop maintenance on July 1 – have fewer than 5 users on Athena but they are AIX dependent. Will announce the end of maintenance.

V. Adjourn by 12:00 and next meeting

Next Scheduled Meeting of ITC ResComp Standing Committee: Monday, May 21st, 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

NOTE: (italics indicate agenda item, regular text the meeting notes.)

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