Minutes for the ITC-Research Computing Standing Committee Meeting

April 24, 2006 at 10:30AM

(2015 Ivy Rd, 1^st floor Conference Room)

 

 

Members: Alice, Bill, Dawn, Ed, Hamp, Kathy G., Katherine H., Jim, Mark S., Martha, Nancy K., Robin, Sue Ellen, Steve, Terry, Tim S., Joe S., Tom S., Tim T.

 

Attending: Alice, Ed, Hamp, Katherine H., Mark S., Martha, Terry, Tim S., Joe S., Tim T.

Chair: Tim T. Recorder: Alice Howard

I. Corrections to minutes from last meeting (Combined Standing Committee and Management) on December 16, 2005? Yes – clarification on new “disk wedge” leasing rates.

 

II. Ongoing Discussion Topics:

 

·   “Condo” Cluster #2 – aka Dogwood:

o      How many nodes ordered? 200 nodes for $321,500.

o      Although two groups were initially interested in participating in this order, none did in the end. There was some discussion about why not: some may need a high-speed interconnect for parallel processing – if so, we might do another smaller cluster to provide this next time; perhaps we need to review the PR, marketing, and outreach we’re doing to solicit participation.

o      Agreed at December meeting to the following timeline: have it set up and configured in June 2006. Therefore advertise it as “go live” in Summer 2006.

·   Cedar Cluster:

o      At December meeting, Hamp said Steve would set up Grimshaw’s AVAKI gateway when cluster was down on 12/20 for maintenance. Is it? Waiting for a new release of AVAKI.

o      Test queue on Cedar goes live this week.

o      Since Dogwood will be getting the latest version of ROCKS, it was agreed that we would do the upgrades to Birch and Cedar in early August.

·   Aspen & Birch Clusters: Any issues or concerns? (Agreed at 4/06 meeting to keep Birch running/ under maintenance support another year.)

·   Oak Cluster: Proposal to make interactive? (Katherine)

o      After some discussion, it was decided that we could provide interactive access to Oak as we do to blue.unix (i.e. with “random placement” as opposed to load balancing) – plus advertise ganglia as a way for users to check on node activity/usage.

·   Teak Cluster: How much longer do we continue to support IRIX on our 6-8 year old equipment?

o      Problem is that this is the only system on which we can legally run Gaussian/G03 which is used by the Chemistry department. So to discontinue support of Teak we would need someone/Chemistry to get a license for linux – or we would have to migrate them to some other code.

·   Proposal for Linux cluster support as ‘for-fee’ service. At December meeting, Hamp said he’d translate current hourly Unix support rates into table/information showing cost for supporting cluster of X size for Y years.

o      Hamp will do a table of some ball-park estimates that we could post – and also point out the virtues of participation in a condo-cluster.

·   New “disk wedge” leasing rates. Have new disk rates discussed in December meeting been approved? The latest rates (not quite approved yet) are:

o      $21 base annual charge (for administration), plus $17.50 per GB per year for first 10 GB, $14.25 per GB per year for the next 11-100 GB, and $13.75 per GB per year for anything > 100 GB.

o      This rate will apply to all our disk leases.

·   Acquiring monitoring tools as discussed in March, especially MPI Link Checker?

o      Hamp will check to see if Bill has ordered this.

·   Andrew Grimshaw’s request for Linux front-end to campus grid project – December meeting: Hamp will follow-up on this.

o      Hamp has not heard back from Andrew – he will call and bug him again.

·   Any news on UVa’s participation in responding to NSF’s Request for Proposals for next generation/iteration of Supercomputing Centers?

o      We have not heard anything.

·   Mitch Rosen’s IT – Infrastructure Supporting Research Task Force. (https://www1.seas.virginia.edu/itrtf). (Maillist is itrtf@virginia.edu)

o      Draft is circulating.

o      Andrew Grimshaw’s concerns that it should address needs of top 2-5% power users/researchers.

o      Secondary group of faculty and ITC staff working on CI-TEAM NSF proposal response.

·   Update on CSS Research Computing support staff and services relocating to Brown Science & Engineering Library and Alderman Library fourth floor in summer 2006.

o      On track to do the move to Clark in early June and the move to Alderman in mid-late June.

 

III. New Business

·   Should we undertake transition from clear text passwords to Eservices for Windows connections to HSM & Longtmp? (Per emails from Steve L./Mark S. in late December?)

o      Yes we should – and are considering some options. We could use the Eservices passwords for all unix logins – and we are experimenting with this now – it would eliminate clear text passwords in a lot of places. No timeline for this yet though.

·   Bit of discussion about the possibility of using Grid FTP with NLR.

 

 

Next Scheduled Meeting of whole Standing Committee group: Monday, June 26, 2006, 10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #102.

 

Next Scheduled Meeting of ITC ResComp Management team: Monday, May 22, 2006, 10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #220.

 

  

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