Minutes of the ITC-Research Computing Standing Committee

(ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room 102)

Meeting on August 25, 2004

 

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

 

Attending: Bill, Ed, Hamp, Kathy G., Katherine H., Jim, Mark S., Martha, Steve, Terry, Tim S., Joe S, Tom S., Tim T.

 

Chair:  Tim T. 

Recorder:  Joe_S.

 

Click here to see the agenda from this meeting.

 

Chair: Tim T.
Recorder: Joe Simard

I. Corrections to minutes from last meeting on July 26, 2004?  None

II. Old Business:

  • Schedule from Hamp on getting these done:
    • Splitting SGI (crick) behind VPN firewall for HIPAA users.

-         Complete except for turning off NIS service

-         As NIS does not work through the firewall a slave server would be required if NIS needs to be behind firewall.

    • Teal Cluster: Put 2 processors removed from crick and put into one teal node; use Craylink hook them together. If other 4 CPUs are compatible, link them as well. Put PBSPro on them.
      • Setup "teal-login" machine. - Block interactive login on all but "teal-login". Use one of SGIs from Unixlab as teal frontend.
      • Per timeline these two items were to be done by second week in August

-         Craylink has been ordered.

-         On receipt of Craylink, reconfigure Teal and two processors from Crick as two nodes with four processors each.  The two nodes may have different amounts of memory.

-         Configure an SGI from the Unix lab as an interactive front-end.

    • Make old "dump.itc"(RS6000 H70) the 64-bit frontend of SMP (mp0.itc). DONE
    • Rename (re-number) Suns in E225 to be sun1 to sun8.unixlab

-         Renumbering is planned for week of August 23rd (this week).-

    • Aspen & Birch cluster upgrade to 2.6 kernel. Timeline dependent on ROCKS upgrade.

-         Bill mentioned Red Hat has not announced their next enterprise version yet.

  • Additional disk space for /longtmp and script to automate checking usage and reminding users...Waiting for disk storage to come available, likely sometime in September

-         Still waiting on storage to become available from Library.

  • Schedule for adding additional disk space to /common on jeeves for pending software installs (e.g,. SAS, Maple).

-         Hamp ordering disks

  • Update on SEAS SUR grant clusters.

-         Reinstallation is needed due to unauthenticated user access.

  • Proposal for Linux cluster support as 'for-fee' service.
    • Need guidelines for how to handle support for researchers who don't purchase cluster support but expect assistance and guidance from ITC for their cluster.

-         Need to set rate for Unix Systems cluster support.

  • 102 Small Hall Unixlab closed August 1st to give space to CS. Praise & thanks to Hamp & his staff and Sharon Drumheller & her staff for working diligently to get everything out so quickly  - The room is empty.

III. New Business:

  • New Linux cluster and condo scheme
      • Each participating researcher/department would pay for some number of nodes with a percentage of those nodes made part of a common pool available to all cluster partners.
      • Each participating researcher/department would also pay a portion of the cost of the infrastructure (gigabit switch, etc) and cluster administration provided by ITC.
      • Nodes in common pool would be available to all cluster partners on a first come first served basis except when a researcher/department submits a job for the full number of nodes they funded.
      • PBS Fair Share would be used to manage allocation of nodes. Although the number of nodes which a researcher/department funded may not be immediately available, Fair Share would provide the funded number on a priority basis as soon as they became available.
      • Need to determine if there will be a minimum number of nodes funded by a researcher/department in order to participate.
      • Participation would require a three year commitment after which nodes would be returned.
      • Fair Share could facilitate one or more researchers/departments pooling resources to become a partner.
      • ITC contribution is expected to be about 32 nodes.
      • Storage is expected to be about 3 terabytes.
      • Configuration is not expected to include MyriNet interconnects.
      • Timeline is to get departmental commitments and order equipment by December 2004.
      • Marketing to researchers/departments

-         Need to manage expectations

-         Consider offering higher % to early adopters

-         Notice in next RSCS Newsletter

-         Need pre-announcement notice to capture grant proposals being written now.

 

  • Rather than using old Sun Ultra's in Carruther Machine room, use most of Unixlab budget to buy new solaris rack mounted servers.

-         Unix lab budget is about $20K

-         Target users are serial users on Aspen clusters of Matlab, SAS, etc.

-         $23k budget is expected to adequately fund 12 processor cluster and rack.

  • Other – Aspen and Birch clusters.

-         Aspen 2yr warranty has lapsed. So prospect is that when Aspen nodes fail, the cluster gets smaller, if warranty extension isn’t funded.

-         Birch warranty expires in December.

-         Birch has 2/3 the number of nodes as the Aspen cluster.

-         Third year of maintenance being considered for both Aspen and Birch. If funding is not adequate for both (~$7k Aspen, ~$5k Birch), priority will be to fund Birch warranty extension.

V. Adjourned by 10:30 AM and next meeting

  • Next Scheduled Meeting: Monday, September 27th, 10:30 AM in ITC-2015 Ivy Road, Room #102

    Suggestions, additions, corrections to: Tim Tolson or Joe_Simard

 

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