Tag: UK

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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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Spectrum Scale UG @Computing Insight UK Agenda available

The Spectrum Scale user group will be meeting at Computing Insight UK (formerly MEW) in December 2015 at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry. The agenda is now available:

  • 10:00 Welcome & Introductions (Simon Thompson, GPFS UG Chair & Claire O’Toole, GPFS UG Secretary
  • 10:05 – Introducing Spectrum Scale 4.2 (Patrick Byrne, Cameron McAllister & Sarfraz Nadeem, IBM UK labs)
    • GUI demo
    • New features – compression and QoS
    • Where we are heading next with 4.2.1 onwards … problem determination focus
  • 11:00 – How to ruin a perfectly good GPFS file system (Vic Cornell, DDN)
  • 11:20 – The Unique Technical Benefits of an Engineered Solution for GPFS (Chris Weeden, Seagate)
  • 11:40 – Networking, Discussion & Feedback
  • 12:00 – Finish

Please note you must be registered for CIUK to attend this meeting.

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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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Performance Roundtable

Last Friday (25th Sept) Rick Welp and I held an informal “Spectrum Scale Performance” roundtable (although for the sake of transparency I must admit that the table was more rectangular than round). The chosen venue was IBM Southbank which neither of us had previously had the pleasure of visiting. The idea was to get together with a small number of GPFS/Spectrum Scale power users
and take advantage of their years of experience to gain insight into the kind of real world issues they deal with and more importantly what we can do to help mitigate them.

To add to that the idea of this post is to share some of the topics we discussed with the wider community and hopefully generate further discussion/ideas. We will look to hold another session, probably in Manchester, in the not too distant future and will be looking for willing participants.

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