Minutes 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.
Attending: Alice, Hamp, Jim,
Joe S., Mark, Tim S., 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?
(Click to review the
Note: (Italics indicate agenda item; normal font, the meeting notes.)
III. Old Business:
- Impending Cluster rollout and retirement – new cluster is named ‘Elder’.
- 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.
- Retire birch by June 4 – done – turned off – no squawks.
- Retire Athena by sometime early in July.
- Elder could be ready in the next few weeks – without the storage node – needs to be functional before we can turn off Athena.
- 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? (Tom absent, no update)
- 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 a 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 the end of June.
- Tim/RCS staff will do review of other institutions queuing and cluster purchase programs in preparation 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). None
- 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.
- VT seems happy to have Andrew run it – plans are to hold the bootcamp starting around August 7 – will use Brown Library classrooms – VT will add a Visualization piece – working on publicity to VT and UVa, with enrollment in July. Might also advertise locally to NRAO, etc.
- Likely need a queue on Dogwood (and/or on another cluster) – and be able to give out IDs.
- Tim T. will put up Andrew’s syllabus.
IV. New Business:
- Major Computational Science Software purchase request
- The group reviewed the communication from Ed Hall & Katherine Holcomb about “Software Licensing for Computational Science and Engineering” – and concluded that before we come to any recommendations/decisions, we should consider priorities and opportunity costs.
- 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?
- Summarize promises, 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
NOTE: (italics indicate
agenda item, regular text the meeting
notes.)
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