Notes for the ITC-Research Computing Standing Committee Meeting
October 12, 2009 at 10:45 AM
ITC-Dynamics 1st Floor Conference Room
Members: Alice, Andrew, 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, Mark, Robin, Tim S., Tom, Ed, Katherine, Kathy
I. Corrections to minutes from last meeting on September 14, 2009? (Click to review the agenda from this meeting)
II. Old Business:
á SGE testing
o Basically no change – but there is some experimenting going on with XCG (cross-campus grid) and SURA.
á Additional memory for Dogwood
o Waiting for AndrewÕs input – but there is not an agreement on what is needed. We have bought memory (10 GB per node) for our SURA cluster nodes (19) – so we can offer some resources with bigger memory on XCG (using globus to submit jobs). Down the line we could still have users that need more memory, but we should decide about the need for more memory while being mindful of the budget timing/cycle. Keep this topic on the agenda.
á Additional disks for Elder
o Hold off on any discussion (again).
á Additional Elder nodes
o Likely that we will pick up 10-12 nodes (without InfiniBand) – and possibly 24 with InfiniBand (if Cameron Mura comes in). Leonard Scott may have approval for his 2 nodes. (Note: the most recent CSAC lunch featured a discussion with Mike Glasgow from OSP about grants applications/administration and the possibility of shared IT resources.)
á Glustre testing
o In production – drop from agenda.
á Web page maintenance
o Katherine working on some – Ed will be working on the Matlab-related information.
á New storage service/pricing
o There is a draft website that documents the functionality and differences between the various levels of storage options for users.
o Jim Jokl has a PowerPoint presentation on this topic that he will send out to the group.
o Hamp reported that they have ÒBetter FSÓ (btrfs) working and it seems stable and does better on snapshots – he is hoping that this will be the file system that we want to use.
á Research software budget
o Skip this topic until Terry can attend.
á Service Unit allocation
o Need Andrew/Mike in order to have more discussion on this topic.
á Finding more grid resources
o They are looking for linux boxes.
á 32-bit Linux application support
o We want to announce that we are not patching/upgrading 32-bit applications – but Tom is going to first pass this idea by Tracy Smith and the Service Transition group.
á
Research computing referrals from PerceptIS
o Nothing done yet – Mark will schedule a meeting about Òwhat to do with research referrals.Ó
III. New Business:
IV. Adjourn by 11:45 and next meeting