Performance Round Table – Round Two

On January 12th, Paul Roberts, Patrick Byrne, Sophie Carsten and I ran a second iteration of performance talks with a small subset of UK Spectrum Scale users. As Paul covered in a previous post, the goal of the meeting was to have an informal chat with these users to gain insights on how they use their clusters, what issues they have concerning their cluster’s performance, and what we can do to help improve the product. We met in the IBM Manchester Development Lab, which allowed us to have developers from the performance, install and upgrade, and system health teams available to discuss the product.

As is the case with all Spectrum Scale User Group meetings, the participants were very happy and open to discuss their Spectrum Scale deployments with us. Since the meeting was designed to be an open and free-flowing meeting, there were a few issues raised by the users and our conversations ebbed and flowed from there.

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Looking back at 2015 …

Well, 2016 has begun, so I thought I’d take a look back at a year with Spectrum Scale. Actually, at the start of 2015, Spectrum Scale wasn’t even a term we were using – GPFS or Elastic Storage were the names we all had in our heads. I’ve heard various rumours about if Elastic Storage was ever meant to be used generally, if it was for the ESS server only, or the code name for the rebranding we eventually came to know as part of the Spectrum portfolio of products. Still, back at the start of 2015 things were different, the System X and GSS Lenovo divestiture was only just completing in the UK and protocol support for non native GPFS access was just an idea on a roadmap (unless you bought SONAS).

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GPFSUG @Computing Insight UK

This week was Computing Insight UK (CIUK) (formerly MEW), which is an annual HPC conference organised by STFC. For those not familiar, its like ISC or SC. Just on a much smaller scale – its a very different show to the major international events and I like being able to walk across the show floor (in 2 minutes) and also knowing ~60-70% of the people there… (and playing which sales person has changed vendor this year is a fun game).

As part of the programme for CIUK, we got a 2 hour “UG@” meeting in, but still we had a packed agenda. Although I’ve been chair of the group for a while, this is the first proper UK general meeting that I’ve been involved in organising so it was with a little trepidation that I took on booking the agenda! Luckily I have Claire to help – organising telecons, chasing me and others to help make sure it works on the day.

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Meet the Devs – Edinburgh

The fourth and final instalment of the 2015 UK Spectrum Scale User Group “Meet the Devs” series recently took place in Edinburgh, and I had the privilege of helping Simon Thompson and Joe Taylor lead the discussions.

Not only was this my first “Meet the Devs” meeting, but it was also my first time spending any real time in Edinburgh (as is the case with most places I have visited lately). Joe and I took the first flight out of Manchester the morning of the event, and after a short taxi ride, we were at the University of Edinburgh.

As Simon mentioned, we had a mixed group of attendees – some new faces and some familiar faces. Some travelled a very short distance and one of the attendees flew in from Germany to meet and share ideas with us.

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Meet the Devs comes to Scotland

Well, this is the first time I’ve made it to a meet the devs meeting. And I chose probably the furthest location out from me, Edinburgh. But its the last of the Meet the Devs tour for 2015* and we like to have a User Group exec member present, so an early start and short flight later I was in Edinburgh. Hopefully we’ll be back in 2016 with some more meet the dev dates, we’ve managed 4 this year, which is about what we set out to do, once a quarter. If you are interested in meet the devs coming to your area, please get in touch with the group.

The event was well attended, and I’d like to thank Orlando for hosting us at University of Edinburgh.

As usual we went in with a general agenda, some topics to discuss but we let the informal sessions go where they want. There was a mixture of re-attendees and people who hadn’t been before, so its good to see people going back as it shows they must be getting value out of them. This time we had Rick Welp and Joseph Taylor from IBM, thanks to both for coming along and leading the day.

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