ATTENDING
- Jerry Sheehan, Josh Turner, Pol Llovet, Jonathan Hilmer, Thomas Heetderks
ABSENT
- Welcome - Jerry
- Hyalite Usage - Jerry & Pol
- Overall
- discussion: is Avg. CPU count reserved or actually used?
- Pol: it is reserved
- discussion: on my jobs, I reserve 8 CPUs even though I only need 2, because I need
more RAM
- Pol: there is a better way to manage reserved RAM in the scheduler [SLURM], we haven't
yet implemented that additional complexity
- Usage by College
- Jerry: any thoughts about ways to use this data?
- Usage by Department
- discussion: CS & Math Depts have been competing to establish a Data Science Center--
when that gets going, we should have more users
- Usage by Lab Group
- Top Twenty Users
- discussion: of course, most of the use from the top few users
- Jerry: this is also how it is with the big players (ie most of Bluewaters useage by
20 or so)
- Usage by Title
- Jerry: we like that we have a good amount of student users
- discussion: I think thats good!
- discussion: no Math Science users?
- Jerry: we're looking at other ways of promoting use: Data Science Competition, Jupyterhub,
etc.
- GLOBUS: Usage last 12 months - Pol
- Pol: you need a Globus-Plus account for transfer from personal to personal
- Jerry: Globus allows anyone who uses Globus to be a transfering partner with our resources
(in either direction)
- Jerry: this is because of Globus handling identity
- Jerry: they also have a nice tool for transfers (resumable, etc)
- Jerry: and Globus is being used by many other campuses
- Jerry: so how do we raise Globus awareness? --get more users?
- discussion: send a letter (email?) to your cluster users
- discussion: those who collect large amounts of data should need to transfer that data...
can we target those users?
- Jerry: we can focus on emerging science users or departments (cores)
- discussion: I know that in Chemistry, they use a lot of big data
- Pol: this use case somewhat overlaps with BOX, but for big transfers its so much better
- Jerry: backup for labs with sensative/unbacked up data (BOX has a 15G file size limit)
- Jerry: Globus has no bridge to BOX at this time (it does for Azure & S3)
- Jerry: I have talked to BOX people to see if they are interested in Globus... we will
see...
- Hyalite Software Usage - Pol
- Pol: determining what users are running is hard-- an unsolved problem
- Pol: you can just ask the user
- Pol: we can see MATLAB license use and we've had a lot of success with the MATLAB
license, but we don't have details about MATLAB CPU usage
- Faculty/Staff/Lab usage: 148 licenses activated
- Student usage: 574 licenses activated
- discussion: good to see high student MATLAB usage
- discussion: why do people load modules that they don't use?
- Pol: people end up loading all the modules they think might need... then don't use
many of them
- HPC Class Overview: CHMY591 - Pol
- Pol: this is a small class (only 5), taught by Robert Szilagyi
- Pol: there will be minimal impact on cluster
- Pol: using scripts that Robert wrote to run class jobs, they don't need much shell
use
- Pol: they will use a special queue for their final jobs (limited nodes), with 8 CPUs
per job
- Pol: they are not really getting command line experience
- discussion: so they're not really learning to use HPC
- Jerry: we're just trying this approach, and wanting your feedback for this approach
- Jerry: with more students, we told provost we would need additional HW for required
classroom load
- Pol: the other "issue" we had on this-- Robert likes AMD CPUs since his software prefers
them, but we use Intel XEONs
- Pol: if we add nodes for classroom use, we need to stick with our XEONs
- CHMY591 Jobs - Pol
- Jobs will mostly be Gaussian
- 8 CPUs, 16GB RAM
- 72 hour job runtimes, max
- Set up a custom class queue for runtime limit
- Impact on the total cluster usage will be minimal
- Hyalite Citations - Jonathan
- Paper publisned by Ryan Snow (Physics) citing Hyalite:
- "Calculations were performed on the Hyalite Research Cluster at Montana State University."
- ACTION: we will get boilerplate posted for future Hyalite citations
- NSF CyberTraining Solicitation - Jerry
- grant opportunity to provide unique training experiences
- possibly training through Extended University
- we are reaching out to vendors for possible partnership (Amazon AWS & Cisco)
- obscurity of solicitation language makes it really though to know what they are looking
for
- an NSF seminar next week with grant PIs might tell us more?
- we need to hear back from our vendors very soon with the quickly approaching Jan.
deadline
- reactions??
- discussion: what about regular for credit courses in Data Visualization Analysis?
- discussion: many students seem to struggle with Data Visualization
ACTIONS
- Need to post boilerplate for Research Paper citations of Hyalite compute resources
on Hyalite web pages
FUTURE AGENDA
- Hyalite RAM Policy
- Hyalite Storage Policy
- Hyalite Expansion Update
- CyberCANOE (display wall) installation
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