Category: Meet the devs

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Meet the Devs – Oxford

On Feb 24th, the latest iteration of the Spectrum Scale – Meet the Devs took place in Oxford. We met on the Oxford University campus and as always, the meeting was well attended. I had the pleasure of meeting some new members in addition to catching up with a few familiar faces. Simon Thompson, the User Group Chair, introduced three IBMers from the Mainz Germany Lab, Ulf Troppens, Simon Lorenz and Stefan Schmidt. After the introductions by Simon and our hosts from Oxford, we started the meeting.

Ulf Troppens started the meeting off by introducing his German colleagues, and he presented a high-level overview of Spectrum Scale’s history through 4.2.

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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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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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Inaugural USA Meet the Devs

Well we did it, we held our first “Meet the Devs” in the US and I’ll venture to say it was successful. Let me emphasize the “we” involved in this event. This was a great joint effort between users and IBM with special thanks to Janet Ellsworth of IBM for all she did to make this event happen, and Doris Conti for making sure lots of IBMers, including lots of developers, came down from Poughkipsie. Thanks also to the US co-principal Bob Oesterlin and Pallavi Galgali for keeping things moving right along behind the scenes. We’ll see Bob and Pallavi in person at the SC15 meeting in Austin.

There’s a poll we’re running to get feedback from the attendees and we’ll see how my own feelings match up with the group’s. The discussion was lively, and everyone felt comfortable to ask direct questions and talk about it all —the good, the bad and the ugly.

From an attendee perspective there was reasonable diversity as well with representatives from financial, medical/genetics, and university sectors.

So, what was covered? I’m glad you asked.

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