Notes for the
ITC-Research Computing Standing Committee Meeting
March 31, 2008 at 10:30 AM
2015 Ivy Road, 1st Floor Conference Room
Members: Alice, Hamp, Jim, Joe S., Mark, Mike, Robin, Terry,
Tim S., Tim T., Tom and members of Systems, Research Computing and ACHS as
desired
Attending: Alice, Hamp, Jim, Joe S., Mark, Robin, Tim S.,
Tom, Bill P., Ed, Katherine, Kathy
Chair: Tom
Recorder: Alice
I. Corrections to minutes
from last meeting on February 25, 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)
- Hamp
thinks the switchover can be completed by the end of April – need
to replace a power panel at the same time.
- Assessment
of Computational Science
Speaker Series?
- Could
have some UVa people give some of the talks; improve on publicity
efforts.
- Update
on A-School (Earl Mark & Eric Field) possibly having HPC windows
compute cluster and harvesting idle cycles from office PCs and labs &
classrooms.
- Update
on CSAC, NSF PetaScale Track 2 meetings, and related.
- Computational Science and HPC Center formation
- CSAC Meeting Wednesday, April 2nd
III. New Business:
- Storage
needs assessment -- LSP dialog (Joe)
- Joe
explained that the LSPs are interested in having more storage at less
cost. An advisory group is working on a survey to gather more information
from the departments – what amounts are needed – what
characteristics are important --- and what are the cost tolerances.
- There
was discussion about where our costs come from: lots of it is related to backups and redundancies.
- Other
options include: work with Cost
Accounting to see if we can do cost recovery differently; mirror once a
day as a backup (as Astronomy does).
- Other
factors to be considered include:
performance, not being backed-up, how critical is availability and
redundancy?
- Joe
will send the survey to this group.
- Cluster
node purchase by faculty -- revisit (Tim)
- Have
received some inquiries about our possible next cluster purchase from
Chemical Engineering – so do we have enough interest to buy one
this year?
- Decided
to say that Ôwe will work with themÕ – and that TimT will follow up
with the Chemical Engineering department.
- ACHS
Large Memory System -- make available to others temporarily? (Tom)
- This
system (for high-throughput DNA sequencing) has just been ordered –
and will likely be available and idle for several months – so we
could open it up to other researchers for awhile IF we want to.
- John Hawley's Guide
to Teragrid application process
- This is a useful document – perhaps we could shorten
it up a bit for our users.
- UVa/Univ
of Michigan/Stanford collaborations update/report.
- Any
news, information from E-School? SURA? CSAC brownbags? UCIT? Other
organizations?
- Any
other Items?
- Availability
of machine room space – if you get an inquiry, talk to Hamp or Jim
first before Ôjust saying noÕ – we do have a bit of flexibility,
but have to look carefully at each request.
- Replacement
for PBSPro queuing system – looks like we have until January Õ09 to
find a substitute for PBSPro.
Alternatives include Torque and Maui – or SGE which provides
integrated queue management and job scheduling. Decided to look at these – with particular
attention to SGE and differences in writing scripts.
- Andrew
G. is keen on putting his grid platform up in public labs and
classrooms. We decided to
install and test it.
- Completion
and review promises and requests from this meeting.
IV. Adjourn by 11:45 and next meeting
- Next
Scheduled Meeting of ITC ResComp Standing Committee: Monday, April 28th,
10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #102 (First Floor Conference Room)!
Please send suggestions, additions, corrections to: Tom or
Alice