Present: -------- 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: ---------------- 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: ------------------------ 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.