SUG Minutes - August 8, 2013

Statewide Users Group Agenda
August 8, 2013    *TENTATIVE**

10:00 a.m.: Coffee and Tea (BALE Conference)

10:15 a.m.: Committee Meetings

    Hardware and Operations (BALE Conference)
    Allocations (BALE Theater)
    Software and Activities (Stutz/Buckeye Conference)

11:45 a.m.: Lunch (BALE Conference)

12:30 p.m.: Welcome--Aravind Asthagiri, Chair

12:30 p.m.: Guest Speaker, Lisa M. Hall, Assistant Professor, HC Slip Slider Professorship, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, "Coarse-Grained Modeling of Ionomers and Salt-Doped Block Copolymers"

1:00 p.m.: OH-Tech/OARnet and OSC Update--Pankaj Shah, Executive Director

1:20 p.m.: Allocations Committee Update--Christopher Hadad

1:30 p.m.: Supercomputing Update--Doug Johnson

1:40 p.m.: IntelSim Launch--Alan Chalker

1:50 p.m.: Research Update--Dave Hudak

2:000 p.m.: User Support, Education, and Training Update--Brian Guilfoos

2:10 p.m.: Approval of Minutes and Remarks; election results--Aravind Asthagiri

2:20 p.m.: Software Committee Report--Rick Prairie

2:30 p.m.: Hardware Committee Report--John Heimaster

Please see attachments for guest speaker's presentation and for the SUG presentation.

Additional Notes:

Minutes were approved as stand.

Election results: Aravind Asthagiri was re-elected as chair; John Herbert was relected as vice-chair

Software Committee notes: Sid Samsi has taken a new position and has left OSC.

Hardware Committee notes:

Future procurement discussion was conducted at today's meeting but will probably require an extraordinary meeting before the regularly scheduled December 12 SUG meeting. The energy consumption of the new system is an issue, but we do have more freedom to expand power consumption of the new system. The work at SOCC has helped, but OSC still has to pay for the power. We are escaping the constraints of not enough available power.

We need SUG's input into the design of the system. We need to determine the proper balance of resources, and we need to have something concrete by January 2014. It is difficult to be concrete without a concrete balance of dollars we can spend. Our diverse community demands that we have a balance of resources. We must take into account the activities people would like to do that they have not been able to do before--they may not even know what they want. The question remains: are the GPUs of the top 500 being used as GPUs.

The ability of accelerators to address main memory directly will elad to lower cost escape from the low memory constraints. GPUs are better but have slower access to memory. Requires algorithm tunign.

Operations discussion concerning container solution; Lustre file system issues. People should not be penalized for not understanding a situation. Memory issues are not always apparent to new users.