Notes for the ITC-Research Computing Standing Committee Meeting
February 25, 2008 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. and members of Systems, Research Computing and ACHS as desired

Attending: Alice, Hamp, Jim, Joe S, Robin, Tim S., Tim T., Ed, Katherine, Kathy
Chair: Tom         (Today's Acting Chair: Tim)
Recorder: Alice

Connection Question: What would make today's meeting a worthwhile time together for you?

I. Corrections to minutes from last meeting on January 28, 2008? (Click to review the agenda from this meeting)

II. Old Business:

• Linux Clusters: Cedar, Dogwood Elder
• Downtime for UPS switchover: Cedar done. Dogwood and Elder left. (UPSes are here) Note – had a brief power failure and Cedar did not go down; goal is to move Dogwood off the generator and just rely on the UPS.
• Update on Computational Science Speaker Series?
• Kelvin Droegemeier (University of Oklahoma) will speak on March 28; he will be the last Computational Science Speaker for this academic year.
• Update on A-School (Earl Mark & Eric Field) possibly having HPC windows compute cluster and harvesting idle cycles from office PCs and labs & classrooms.
• No news on this item – although we did have some discussion about the purpose of harvesting these cycles.
• Update on CSAC, NSF PetaScale Track 2 meetings, and related.
• Computational Science and HPC Center formation
• Notes from February 13, 2008 CSAC lunch meeting
• John Hawley's summary of January 17, 2008 CSAC lunch meeting
• Andrew Grimshaw's proposal for start-up from January CSAC lunch meeting: UVACS-2008Janplan (Download Powerpoint Version)
• Currently seeking nominees for the faculty governing body (from the College science departments, SEAS, and the School of Medicine).

IV. New Business:

• PBSPro Support Licensing request email from Katherine.
• There was discussion about sticking with PBSPro versus switching to another scheduler. Since this is a part of the larger discussion about ‘what is the right scheduler’ – and that we want input/decision from the proposed new faculty governing body, we decided to table this issue for the time being.
• Should we raise blue.unix's one-hour CPU job limit?
• This has come up because some student SAS users find it easier to run their jobs on blue. We decided to do some education – give them some scripts – help them run on the clusters – and leave the one-hour CPU limit as it is.
• UVa/Univ of Michigan/Stanford collaborations update/report.
• Still searching for a project in need of this collaboration – something may come of it though (e.g. repositories).
• Any news, information from E-School? SURA? CSAC brownbags? UCIT? Other organizations?
• Any other Items?
• There was discussion about purging students’ accounts after they leave UVa. There has not been an account purge in 2-3 years. Does not seem to be a large problem, but at least one student is continuing to access the clusters without sponsorship. We could delete accounts other than their CMS accounts. We could cleanup blue.unix accounts – but we have usually done an all-or-nothing cleanup and there are a few students using email on blue. Once student email migrates to Google mail or Windows Live, we will be deleting CMS accounts for students. So we decided to wait a semester and see if this takes care of it. Hamp is going to send Robin a list of students who have blue.unix as their primary email (for the Google mail transition).
• 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, March 31st, 10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #102 (First Floor Conference Room)!
  Please send suggestions, additions, corrections to: Tom or Alice