(Posted on behalf of Stefano from SPXXL):
During February we had a wonderful GPFS Day during the SPXXL Winter Meeting that took place at LRZ in “Garching bei München, Germany”.
For those who are not familiar, here are a few notes on what SPXXL is and does:
SPXXL is a user group for sites which have large installations of IBM or Lenovo equipment. The focus of the SPXXL group is on large-scale scientific/technical computing using IBM or Lenovo hardware. Some of the areas we cover are: Applications, Code Development Tools, Communications, Networking, Parallel I/O, Resource Management, System Administration, and Training. We address topics across a wide range of issues that are important to sustained petascale scientific/technical computing on scaleable parallel machines.
The SPXXL is a self-organized and self-supporting group. Members and affiliates are expected to participate actively in the SPXXL meetings and activities and to cover their own costs for participating. SPXXL meetings are open only to members and affiliates of the SPXXL. SPXXL member institutions must have an appropriate non-disclosure agreement in place with IBM and Lenovo, since at times both vendors disclose and discuss information of a confidential nature with the group. Beginning in 2015 the winter workshop was focused on Lenovo and their partners and the summer workshop will be focused on IBM and their partners.
Coming back to the GPFS Day, as usual, it was one of the most important days of the SPXXL week where we went through many interesting arguments approached mainly from a user prospective with no intent to do any kind of marketing.
As a speaker, we had 3 IBM people (1 GPFS developer, 1 TSM/HSM Developer and 1 IT Specialist), 1 Lenovo and 2 Site updates from the community.
I have been really surprised by people engagement during and after the presentations. Every speaker included has been really open and willing to get any possible challenge creating an atmosphere of a real user group meeting.
Another nice surprise has been to get direction from IBM developers on what they expect from a user when there is a problem. It has been a kind of myth buster on what a standard user does and on what should be done in order to help debugging.
This has been the kind of day we had and we hope to do this more often under the umbrella of SPXXL & GPFSUG.