SSUG at CIUK, Manchester 2021

December 2021 saw the return of an in person user group event as part of the annual CIUK conference in Manchester. Whilst it wasn’t the busiest SSUG we’ve run, it was great to see colleagues back and talking about Scale. The event was of course held in-line with government guidelines and all attendees were asked to wear masks throughout CIUK – and for the most part, people did do this!

The sessions kicked off with Indulis Bernsteins (IBM), an SSUG regular speaker, presenting on what’s new in 5.1.3. Whilst we’ve run a few “What’s new” sessions digitally, actually being in the room and having people be able to ask questions directly was a great return. (Personally, I’ve talked and presented at a few digital/online events over the past year or two, and the lack of any kind of response from the audience is what I’ve found most difficult, so it was great to actually see people respond in person!)

Steve Hindmarsh, Francis Crick Institute then presented an update on Scale at the Crick, as well as talking about the older systems, Steve also gave us a little sneak peak at the new storage going in in 2022.

Daniel Kidger followed on, Daniel is also a familiar speaker at SSUG, but now is at HPE. Since moving there, he’s been pulled in to working with the ECE storage systems now shipped by HPE and gave an update on the licensing model, servers as well as some detail on scaling and performance of the systems. … I think this is the first production system ECE talk we’ve had so far at SSUG!

Finally, Indulis returned to the stage giving an update on Spectrum Discover and use cases with Spectrum Scale.

I’d like to extend a personal thanks to all the speakers at CIUK for agreeing to even speak in person, as well as to all the attendees who made it and joined us for the event. Actually, not just for the CIUK21 event, but over the past few years – due to a change in role, I’m standing back from running the user group. We even got a volunteer at CIUK to agree taking on running events in the UK! A big shout out of thanks should go to Ulf Troppens, from IBM who has worked with the user group over the past few years, finding speakers and topics that fit the user group agenda! The past two years has been difficult with no in-person events, so actually getting to do one as my last running the group was a great opportunity… I’m sure I’ll still see many of the SSUG colleagues in the future, I’ve met some great people in my time running the group and that has supported some interesting projects as well as giving some fantastic conversations. I’m sure the user group will continue to thrive, and with restrictions on events changing, maybe we’ll see some more in-person opportunities and get to meet in person again!

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Spectrum Scale UK April 2018 report

That’s a wrap!

Yes, we’ve made it to the end of another successful Spectrum Scale user group! This year has been our most highly attended group with over 110 registrations and around a 90% attendance rate. We had representation from 56 organisations and delegates from 13 countries as well as 29 speakers over 28 sessions. A big thank you goes out to all our IBM, sponsor and user speakers.

For 2018, we headed back to London and the IBM Client Centre London on the South Bank. The client centre team rightly deserve our thanks – where nothing was too much trouble for them. Finding us cables to plug our streaming kit and generally making sure the logistics of the venue were all dealt with.

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Event report: SSUG @SCA18

What a great start to new Spectrum Scale usergroups in Singapore, held at Supercomputing Asia at Resorts World Convention Centre.
There were a range of attendees, from private and public organisations, from Managing Directors to HPC Specialists and System Administrators, attending from countries pan-Asia-Pacific – India to China and Japan, to New Zealand and Australia.

As the conference theme and stream included AI and Data Analytics and Machine Learning, we had quite a few developers and sys admins who run various analytics workload on scale, but are looking to see what is new.

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CIUK Event Report

Well that’s it for the user group in 2017! The last event of the year was held as part of Computing Insights UK (CIUK) in Manchester this week. CIUK is a much smaller event that SC or ISC, but its where the user group’s roots are. In fact, the user group on 12th December 2017, was the 7th birthday of the group which held its first meeting (of about 8 people) at MEW (the forerunner of CIUK).

Since then the group has grown, and whilst the CIUK meeting is never as large as the main events, we still had 20-30 attendees.

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Event report: SSUG @SC17

We had well over 150 participants for the Spectrum Scale User Group at this year’s Supercomputing Conference held in Denver, USA, which took place on Sunday afternoon November 12, 2017.

A highlight of the event was several user talks, including Max Dellbrück Center, University of Pennsylvania Medical, DESY / European XFEL, and the University of Birmingham. We also heard about improvements to restriping and mmfsck, multiple enhancements resulting from CORAL work and other new features coming with Scale 5.0. We’re getting all the talks uploaded, so you can check out the details for yourself. We ran a little bit late as usual, but that was due to all the great questions from the audience. Thanks as always for making this an interactive event.

We’re looking for a site to host the next US event in the spring. If you’re interested in hosting, have ideas for a talk please reach out to Kristy or Bob at the US user group committee.

Update: Slides are available online