Notes for the ITC-Research Computing Management Meeting
December 17, 2007 at 10:30 AM
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, Terry, Tim S., Tom, Tim T.

Chair: Tim T.
Recorder: Alice Howard

I. Connection Question: How invested are you in the well-being and success of today's meeting (and/or this group)?
( On a scale where 0 = Low to 7 = High) And what's the story you're telling yourself about that?

II. Corrections to minutes from last meeting on November 30, 2007?
(Click to review the agenda from this meeting)

III. Old Business:

• Update on CSAC, NSF PetaScale Track 2 meetings, and related.
• There was discussion about the pros/cons of UVa’s possible participation – with some agreement that our needs are really for more support and education for users here so that they could be successful in accessing some of the unused national cycles – although we might well benefit from the experience of going through the proposal process. Mike is drafting a memo to go out to CSAC in January.
• The next "condo cluster" planning.
  Current web site: http://itc.virginia.edu/research/itc-clusters/
• Public forum on queuing policies - in late January or early February.
• Ed & Katherine doing review of other institutions queuing and cluster purchase programs in preparation – and pulling together information from other institutions.
• Katherine has gathered some information while at BioMed HPC Conference in Boston.
• Katherine's 2006 proposal PBS Service Units Proposal
• CSAC request to Tom for report on current cluster use vis-a-vis PBS queue use/analysis.
• Looking at what applications 8 possible TeraGrid candidates are using
• Linux Clusters: Cedar, Dogwood Elder
• Downtime for UPS switchover: may not be needed as we are idling one circuit at a time – moving it – bringing it up and back online – will probably have 2/3 moved by the end of the week. Hamp will write up something about this and the consequences for potential power outages for the Newsletter.
• HPC Bootcamp January 7-11, start with UVa only, Intro to Unix workshop on Jan 3-4, have about 15-16 registered so far – have a classroom and making other arrangements and getting class accounts.
• Update on Computational Science Speaker Series: Jack Dongarra (Univ. Tennessee & ORNL) will speak on February 11; Kelvin Droegemeier (Oklahoma U) will speak on March 28.
• Had two meetings with A-School (Earl Mark & Eric Field) about possible HPC windows compute cluster and harvesting idle cycles from office PCs and labs & classrooms.
• They are going to try this on a small scale first with Lela piloting it in the A-School classrooms.
• Tom has agreed to chair this committee for 2008
• Discussion of purpose of group: is it a Big-picture & Policy group? A Nitty-Gritty operational group?
• There was discussion about the purpose of the group – and concluded that the major purpose for this group is to focus on Direction, the Big-picture and Policy – mixed with attention to some of the nitty-gritty operational issues – with attendance open to all research computing support staff, but not required of them.
• Establish our Operating Agreements: Some possibilities:
• notification of attending or not?
• Start and end on time? Build in travel time to meeting schedule?
• Meeting day and time?
• End meetings with clear requests and promises for action.
• Don't leave meeting with unspoken issues or concerns.
• Others?

IV. New Business:

• Any news, information from E-School? SURA? CSAC brownbags? UCIT? Other organizations?
• Any other Items?
• Have we established a fee for linux cluster administration? On a Unix Systems’ page we do list services and rates (annual, hourly) for system administration – we have had one inquiry and no takers.
• What about staffing for research support? The current position-reallocation opportunities list does not include any positions for research support – what happened to them? There was some discussion about the history for these positions – and also about their relationship to the current discussion about establishing a new ‘HPC Center’ for research support and collaboration – and also about the level at which it makes the most sense to provide support staff (i.e. centrally? at the school level? at the department level?).
• Completion and review promises and requests from this meeting.

V. Adjourn by 11:45 and next meeting

• Next Scheduled Meeting of ITC ResComp Standing Committee: Monday, January 28th, 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