SUG Meeting Minutes September 14, 2006

Members Attending














OSC Staff Attending

Stan Ahalt
David Bertram
Paul Buerger
Alan Chalker
Steve Gordon
George Haller
Doug Johnson
Dave Kehrle
Ashok Krishnamurthy
Elaine Landwehr
Rick Mohr
Dick Piccard
Jordan Schweller
Leslie Southern
Eric Stahlberg
Pete Wyckoff

Site Consultants Attending



Guests Attending


Welcome / Robert Marcus

  • Changes to July minutes. Bud Bratton was not in attendance. Members moved to approve minutes with changes.
  • Elaine Landwehr asked attendees to sign the sign-in sheet for greater accuracy on minutes.
  • Distinguished lecturer program: Jack Dongerra will speak in January. Details being finalized

    Guest Speaker: Dr. Hesham El-Gamal, Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University

    SUG Election Results / Rick Prairie

  • 18 members voted. Robert Marcus and Kathy Liszka reelected as Chair and Vice Chair

    SUG Member Activities

  • Nothing to report

OSC Update / Stan Ahalt

  • OSC and ASC MSRC at WPAFB
    • Both are HPC centers with OSC state and ASC federal
    • OSC supports ASC through PET and HPC Support Contract
    • OSC Beavercreek is local liaison for doing business with WPAFB and Dayton industry
    • OSC Springfield is link to OSC Columbus along Dayton - Columbus technology corridor
    • All connected via TFN
  • OSC Accomplishments
    • Provided High Performance computing services to 683 researchers who worked on 277 projects, consuming 6,918,900 computational hours - a 20% increase over the past two years.
    • OSCnet connects 87 higher education institutions, 2 Federal Facilities, 30 Information Technology Centers and all of Ohio K-12 and 9 Public Broadcasting Stations.
    • Reduced network bandwidth costs by an average of 41%
    • Established the Ralph Regula School of Computational Science - a statewide virtual school focused on the exciting new area of computational science
    • Launched the Blue Collar Computing initiative - providing high performance computing access and expertise for businesses as a key to competitiveness in the world market.
  • Budget
    • Putting forward aggressive budget proposal
    • Placeholder numbers at 50%-70% of requests for OSC Networking and OSC
    • Operating Funds Review - Budget vs. Actual Table, July 1, 2005 - June 30, 2006
      • Did well in HPC and amazingly well with OSC Networking
      • Erased prior operating deficit
    • Liz Hart retired and George Haller working on pulling budgets together
    • FY 2007 Operating Budget
      • OSC Networking revenue reduced due to decreased rates
      • Budget looks good
      • Question about shared instrument control machines
  • Strategic Planning Overview
    • Review of recent trends
    • Interviews with all major operating groups and managers at OSC
      • Review of existing programs
      • Evaluation of past strategies
      • Indications of problems
    • Formation of strategic planning committee
    • Identified strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
    • Committee and management team issues
    • Advisory committees suggested associating tactical goals with required resources
    • Revising the plan
      • Management team asked to explicitly define the benefits of each tactical goal and its relationships to the strategic goals
        • Benefits to OSC
        • Benefits to higher education
        • Benefits to the State of Ohio
        • Benefits to specific constituencies of researchers, network users
      • Define initial metrics for each tactical goal
    • Process for revision
      • Charged each area with creating actionable tactical goals and actions plans
      • Multiple meetings
    • Revised document
      • Reexamined all tactical goals
      • Created a worksheet for each
    • Showed sample worksheet used

Research Update / Ashok Krishnamurthy

  • Blue Collar Computing Partnerships Expanded
    • Advanced manufacturing activities
    • Industrial consortia
    • R&D Organizations
    • Technical computing software vendors
    • Manufacturers
    • Working closely with Council on Competitiveness
  • Article on Computer Week this week with Tom Lange of Proctor & Gamble
  • BCC Applications Stress Large Scale HPC
  • WMI Ohio High Performance Computing Science and Industry Center
    • ODOD Third Frontier Wright Mega-centers of Innovation RFP
    • Submitted proposal August 29th
    • Expect announcement in December
    • WMI Focus Areas and Collaborators table - industry,federal, and academic in Aero Power & Propulsion, Energy, Advanced Materials, Biological Sciences
  • NSF proposal - confidential discussion

OSC Networking Update / Paul Schopis

  • OIT: no changes to report
  • eTech
    • Ongoing partnership
    • Last mile connection approximately 30% complete
    • eTech in-housing network operations center, Internet and videoconferencing services, previously outsourced to OIT
    • OSC Networking/OSC addressing the impact for collaboration Higher Ed and K-12 through joint engineering meetings
  • One Community / One Cleveland
    • Agreement signed July 2006
    • Tactical details being worked out
    • Joint presentation in NE Ohio being scheduled for October 2006
  • Community Based Economic Development:
    • DubLink: Will provide redundancy to TFN through Lewis Center
    • CORN (Central Ohio Research Network) wins an international development award (International Economic Development Council) - September 19, 2006, NYC
    • Tuscarawas County
      • Tech Park ground breaking on July 8, 2006
      • This is the first rural economic development pilot ring on TFN
      • Capacity exchange
      • Low cost alternative to purchasing or building fiber
      • Involves the swap of Wave (bandwidth) between service providers
      • First discussed at All Sector meeting in Feb 2006 initiated by ODOD and Lt. Governor'ss office
  • National Collaborations
    • MERIT in Michigan
      • Agreement signed June 2006
      • Physical connectivity in progress
      • Completion date 12/3/2006
      • Begin at 1Gig up to 10Gig
      • beginning of Regional Optical Network in Midwest
    • OSC Networking leadership have several committee appointments

Allocations Update / Christopher Hadad

  • Classroom grants: 2 for total 5,000 RUs
  • Start up: 20 for total 100,000 RUs
  • Standard: 3 for total 30,000 RUs
  • Major: 5 requests. Gave 3 full awards for total of 90,000 RUs and 2 partial awards for total of 20,000 RUs
  • Total Allocations: 215,000 RUs
  • Negative balances: small glitch in algorithm for auto notification has been fixed
  • Will improve guidelines for proposal preparation will implement change in gradation soon
    • Rick Prairie suggested changing startup grant to start up account.
    • Christopher suggested calling it startup allocation
    • Charlotte Elster said we should call it a grant
    • Stan said that we should refer to the grants as awards. We are deterring new users with current names
    • Since start up grant and classroom grants are not subject to peer review, it should be renamed to allocations. Rick Prairie moved this and seconded. Passed.

Software Update / Rick Prairie

  • Intel Linux Compilers and Libraries (C++, Fortran, MKL Libraries, IPP Libraries, Vtune). Order not finished yet.
  • Renewals
    • SAS OSU only from O'Donnell Funds
    • Mathematica
    • Abaqus
    • Portland Group compilers
    • Guassian g03 in process
    • Mathworks MATLAB OSU license only. Through O'Donnell Foundation. In process
    • MATLAB HPC unlimited demo license continued
    • Temporary MATLAB license should still be good
  • Coming up
    • Ansys

    • Totalview X86_64: Looking at alternate licensing option . This scheme also views x86 and x86_64 as same architecture for licensing purposes

  • Bioinformatics update
    • TimeLogc License renewed for 12 more months
    • RAXML installed to support phylogenetic analysis
    • Requests for drug and molecular docking software
    • Renewal for GCG software is coming due not recommended
    • Training on Partek statistics software is being planned
  • Committee working on some tools to help new users identify which software would be helpful for them. Will discuss at next meeting

Hardware Update / John Heimaster

  • Storage
    • Can keep current storage for about year
    • Expensive maintenance for current storage system.
    • Will retain some of current system and add to it
  • New acquisition
    • Discussed workload and how might impact acquisition
    • Some of committee thought small amount of money should go to heterogeneous solution
    • Committee asks Center to call on them as procurement progresses

HPC Update & User Services Update / Leslie Southern

  • PBS Usage Data (Nov 05 to Aug 06)
    • Overall usage down by 13%
    • Itanium2 Cluster usage down by 20%
    • Pentium 4 Cluster usage down by 28%
    • X1 and Altix usage about the same
    • Apple Cluster up by 54%
  • Rick Mohr talked about Ganglia monitoring software . It's good for short term diagnostics on machines
  • Number of users typically around 320, with 183 different projects in last two months
  • Problem reports
    • Database system with problems assigned to individuals in systems and STS
    • High number problem reports in July
    • Average 80 problem reports per month
  • Growth in Active User Data table
    • Doubling home space every 12 months
    • Will be petaflop by 2007 (Compare to Library of Congress containing 20 TB of text)
    • May need to look at policies for data and new hardware
  • HPC Objectives
    • Empower scientists and engineers
    • Grand challenge applications
    • Blue Collar Computing Enable breakthrough science
    • Experimentalists with large amounts of data
    • Immediate turnaround
    • Ready access via Web browser
    • Nontraditional disciplines (e.g. Arts, History)
    • Meet and exceed customers' demands
    • Increase OSC visibility
  • HPC Acquisition
    • Process has been learning experience.
    • Have made good contacts with vendors
    • Discussion Potential HPC Choices table showing vendor options
    • Rick Prairie asked when decision to be made. Leslie Southern said it will be made soon
  • Training
    • August 10 & 11, Introduction to VTK: The Visualization Toolkit (at OSC and over the Access Grid)
      • 5 universities attended, 6 different departments represented
      • 1 DOE site attended over AG
      • Staff from OSU Medical Center and Children's Hospital attended
    • September 26, HPC Overview
    • October 6 & 13, Introductory and Intermediate MATLAB, at Ohio University
    • October 16 - 18, Altair HyperMesh and Hyperview, at OSC
    • Podcasts: To evaluate this tech as means for delivering training and technical support information, the following podcast will be available this fall HPC Overview (3 podcasts)

Closing Comments / Robert Marcus

  • Welcome members' recommendations for speakers
  • Looking for ideas to invigorate membership to SUG
  • Leslie asked members to send her emails if they would like to meet with Jack Dongarra in January