Minutes from the ITC-Research Computing Standing Committee Meeting, 28 Jul 2008

Notes for the ITC-Research Computing Standing Committee Meeting
July 28, 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 and members of Systems, Research Computing and ACHS as desired

Attending: Alice, Hamp, Jim, Joe S., Mark, Mike, Robin, Terry, Tom, Ed Hall
Chair: Tom
Recorder: Alice

II. Old Business:

Joe reported that there was light response to the survey with most departments reporting needs of 1-5 terabytes – however Physics and Astronomy need a lot! more. The report still needs to be written, reviewed, and disseminated to the LSPs. There might be some interest in a mid-tier storage model that does not provide backups.

There are two new faculty hires on the horizon that might be interested in participating in a new cluster. Is it possible for us to replace Cedar with a cluster of the same scale or bigger?
We could probably do something similar to Cedar (with dual processors) for $200,000 -- minus some new faculty $$ -- so we might need ~$125,000. Would this be sufficient? Also, there is a possible donor.
Michael Shirts (coming in August to Chemical Engineering) does not need this on day 1 – but does not want to wait a year. Could he use national resources? Not sure – his research needs high-speed interconnects. Tom said that Michael Shirts could have almost exclusive use of an ACHS machine until December – Tom will email Michael Shirts.

Will wait to hear from Tim S. about this topic at the next meeting. (Tim indicates that this item can be dropped. tas, 8/25/08.)

Kathy G. has moved to Brown (where they are hiring some wage folks) – Nancy K is staying in the Scholars’ Lab – both will be reporting to their Library managers. ITC has allocated funding for one more research support FTE.
Aron and Joe are looking into the management of software renewals.
Have decided to do ‘targeted email news bulletins’ rather than continue with the monthly research newsletter. Need to look at the ownership of the various Research mailing lists.

III. New Business:

Andrew G suggests that we pay the fee rather than put users through a transition.
The license is going from free to $6,000/year – Astronomy, CS etc. are also interested in participating in such a license.
Alternatives include switching to SGE or to Torque/Maui.
There was further discussion about the pros/cons of paying for PBS Pro vs. switching to some other free product – decided to put this decision off until the next meeting – and meanwhile to have a small sub-group (maybe Dawn, Katherine, BillP., plus Scott R from CS and someone from Astronomy) document the trade-offs for us and our users – using Katherine’s earlier document about where we could go with this – and adding some description about how we would get there. The possibility of charging came up – but we’d need to be careful about setting precedents/expectations/etc.

Engineering firm has been hired. The conceptual design is getting done – this will then go to the BOV for approval – after which a more detailed design will be developed. Timetable is still “2 years from now.”

All settled with Gaussian – the order for the Linux version is out – and we got more interest from different departments – kudos to Mike Warlick in Procurement Services!

In order to align more effectively with the CSAC meetings (often the first Wednesday of the month), we are moving our meeting to the second Monday of the month.

Any news, information from E-School? SURA? CSAC brownbags? UCIT? Other organizations?
Any other Items?

There will be a Microsoft High Performance Computing talk on August 7 in Minor Hall – Ed will help publicize this talk to researchers.

IV. Adjourn by 11:45 and next meeting

Next Scheduled Meeting of ITC ResComp Standing Committee: Monday, September 8 in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #102 (First Floor Conference Room)!
Please send suggestions, additions, corrections to: Tom or Alice