Present:
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David Colling, Raymond Beuselinck (HEP),
Robert Kingham (Plasma),
Stefan Scheel (QOLS),
James Spencer (CMTH),
Carl Paterson (Photonics),
Elizabeth Lucek (2nd Year Computing),
John Conway (Learning Technology),
Stephen Quirke, Adrian Wong, Adrian Mannall (ICT)
General summary:
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In the absence of a specific agenda representatives of each group present
gave a brief summary of activity and computing requirements within their
section with a view to identifying common areas of interest.
The main issue to emerge concerned provision of software licences in a cost
effective manner, in particular for Mathematica. There were three main
action items to emerge from the meeting for consideration:
1. Mathematica licensing
2. Undergraduate computing project servers
3. Distribution list for the Daily ICT bulletin
For details on the action items see the earlier message from David Colling.
Adrian Mannall gave a report of news from ICT. This has already been
forwarded to this mailing list.
It was agreed to aim for future meetings roughly one per term.
Reports from the groups:
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Plasma:
The group are heavy users of HPC resources and have contributed 500 cores
to the system in exchange for a dedicated queue. It is felt that the
documentation of the HPC system is inadequate. There is also a small
cluster of machines in the level 1 Huxley computer room. The group runs a
web server for data hosting. There are 14 Matlab licences used in the
plasma group.
QOLS:
There are four sub-groups within QOLS, each with their own systems. They
are not using HPC yet. The CCM group are collecting huge amounts of data
(Terabyte datasets) and are using a commercial backup service in Germany
which costs 49 Euros per Tb per month; this is cheaper than ICT can
provide.
CMTH:
The group has a half-time sysadmin. There are about 40 Linux workstations
and a couple of very old clusters in the group. CMTH are heavy HPC users.
They have licences for Maple, Mathematica (~5) and Intel compilers. They
run their own web server and NFS server. They currently do their own tape
backups.
Photonics:
The group is running a mixture of operating systems. They are not using HPC
very much. There is an ageing cluster of 36 machines. There are a number
of computers running equipment which results in old operating systems tied
to old hardware. There is an NFS3 server and lots of ad hoc systems behind
a local firewall. There are number of web servers and blog servers running.
There are some Matlab users and some use of Mathematica. Due to the high
costs of licensing for large clusters there is increasing use of Python for
large computations. The group has an increasing need for data storage.
HEP:
The group has a mixture of Linux and Windows desktops. There is general
purpose Linux cluster for group use, in addition to the Grid resources
which form a large part of the London Tier 2 located in our computer room
in level 1 Blackett. The group has a full time system manager and is in
the process of hiring an additional system manager to support the Grid
resources. The group runs its own web server and mail server. There are
two backup servers for local accounts and essential systems. On the Grid
side we have about 700Tbytes of storage locally, but none of it is unique
data. The group's most notable requirement is for high network throughput
to external sites for Grid traffic. The network link to the computer room
has been upgraded to 10Gb.
Teaching:
There was some discussion of what we should be teaching the undergraduates.
We currently teach C++ and this remains popular with the students as it is
perceived to be a valuable addition to their CV. Whether we should be
using a Windows environment for this is less obvious. Most research
computation is done on Unix based systems. The possibility of running
Linux in a virtual machine on the teaching PCs was suggested. Provision of
dedicated servers for long running undergraduate projects was also
discussed; see the earlier summary of actions circulated by David Colling.
John Conway distributed copies of information on the various services
available to the department in support of teaching activities. In
particular the availability of scripting tools to automate tasks such as
collating course marks and generating a variety of reports and statistics
was discussed.