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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SSUG @CIUK 2021

SSUG will be returning to CIUK for 2021 … our agenda is still to be confirmed, but the plan is to run 10:00 – 12:00 on Friday 10th December.

To attend this user group event, you must be registered to attend CIUK, registration is online at https://www.scd.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/CIUK2021.aspx

Agenda:

10:00 – Welcome, Simon Thompson – Group Chair

10:05 – Spectrum Scale Update, Indulis Bernsteins

10:30 – User Group Matters, Simon Thompson – Group Chair

10:40 – Research Storage at the Crick – Steve Hindmarsh, Francis Crick Institute

11:00 – Erasure code edition and HPE – Daniel Kidger, HPC

11:25 – Spectrum Discover with Spectrum Scale, Indulis Bernsteins

11:45 – Anything else? … otherwise … Wrap up and close, Simon Thompson – Group Chair

Spectrum Scale user group @Computing Insights

This event is part of Computing Insights UK and attendees must be registered for CIUK to attend the meeting.

StartEndTitleSpeaker
1511:3011:45Big Data and AI at ScaleTomer Perry (IBM)
2011:4512:05Experience of CES as an NFS ServerFrederik Ferner (Diamond Light Source)
2512:0512:30TBCSven Oehme (DDN)
3012:3013:00Deep Dive – Block and inode allocation in Spectrum ScaleTomer Perry (IBM)

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.

Continue reading “CIUK Event Report”