[Beowulf] SC13 wrapup, please post your own

[Prentice Bisbal]

Adam,

Thinks for all the information. As always, all the interesting BoF's 
were always at the same time. I wanted to many of the BoF's you 
mentionedbut ended up going to "sexier" ones. My own SC13 wrapup to be 
coming soon.

Prentice

On 11/23/2013 03:44 PM, Adam DeConinck wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA512
>
>
>> 14) Quality of talks/BOFs: I've heard from many sources that the talks
>> and BOFs were great.  I miss having time to attend them, but will push
>> for this next year.  The admin BOFs seem to be strongly in demand.
>>
> There were definitely a few really good admin-oriented BOFs, though I'd
> love to see more love for admin topics at the conference in general. A
> few of my favorite sessions included:
>
> * "Getting Scientific Software Installed: Tools & Best Practices"
>
> BoF web page:
> https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild/wiki/SC13-BoF-session
>
> This BoF covered a few tools for building and managing software on
> compute clusters, including Robert McLay's excellent Lmod tool [0] (a
> better implementation of environment modules), EasyBuild [1] (automates
> software builds and auto-generates Modulefiles), and Hashdist [2] which
> also automates software builds and seems more oriented to dev
> workstations than clusters.
>
> The BoF also included a live survey of the Bof participants on
> software management practices on clusters (results [3]), which I
> thought was very interesting.
>
> [0] Lmod: https://github.com/TACC/Lmod
> [1] EasyBuild: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild
> [2] Hashdist: https://github.com/hashdist/hashdist
> [3] Software management survey:
> http://hpcugent.github.io/easybuild/files/SC13_BoF_show-of-hands-results.pdf
>
>
> * "Trends in Small HPC Center Management"
>
> This is one of my favorite BoFs every year, as you get to see what the
> campus-scale and other "small" HPC sites are doing on a variety of
> topics. They send out a survey to past years' participants every year
> and show the results at the BoF; this year can be found at [4]. The
> discussion was also a lot of fun, with a lot of discussion of job
> schedulers and all the pain they cause...
>
> [4] Small-HPC 2013 survey results deck: http://bit.ly/18xhFoc
>
>
> * "HPC Systems Engineering and Administration"
>
> This felt like the flagship sysadmin BoF to me. Unfortunately I ended up
> distracted during the second half due to some unhappy user emails from back
> home, but I remember some very interesting discussion about monitoring
> systems, provisioning, and configuration management. I've got a long new
> list of software to play with when I get some spare time... ;-)
>
> There was also some good discussion of the fact that we need more
> system administration and engineering coverage at Supercomputing, and
> about how hard it is to find talent (!) and connect with others in the
> field. There's a new "sc-admin" mailing list [5] which was collecting
> signups, and while there isn't anything there yet, it might also be of
> interest to folks on this list.
>
> [5] http://isaac.lsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/sc-admin
>
>
> Those were some of the highlights I remember, but I recognized some
> other Beowulfers at these and other BoFs. Anyone else want to chime in,
> or tell me about something I missed? :)
>
> Cheers,
> Adam
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (Darwin)
>
> iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJSkRPBAAoJEGqxms5cZfz0OUAIALb9+UPgg1utceuKzTx5td6O
> qkdw6infSvTjJcgvVrRHp2tigFeiytLr4syUu/jaqOPdeyL2jWsOIEUOGJPVf8s+
> sTXqU3AXjY6Cldn64pTOxFkbVg2yqC+xK+uxPfGWi7T5Ow6c2OTM3yJ1kaj0UM3m
> Buo4Rv9Gkf20KPzrsxMryadbX4un6p2yd3a4BIKCmA/vTVfIZhEk4M3BxPiUiEb5
> gEyLUsczhLjFM+n6Cce2b9DqoMqm63hKX9MppnK1+X/uKfVLXY7ns8aqo2ys3Pnl
> umscCXMj15oDjPmXo+y0otAqAoOQ/lYxgmk120LWWI3jmYu7T2t+pkye+K/mWGU=
> =xcX0
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf