[Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: Introduction and question

Fri Mar 22 13:47:27 PDT 2019

I matriculated (enrolled) at Glasgow University in 1981 (Scots lads and
lasses start Yoonie at a tender age!).
My Computer Science teacher was Jennifer Haselgrove.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenifer_Haselgrove

Wonderful lady, who of course did not have a degree in Comp Sci - as there
were none when she was an undergrad.
First lecture - algorithms and debugging.
How do you make a cup of tea?  Well - describe the steps to make a cup of
tea to your cat.
Best advice on development and debugging I have ever had. Get yourselves a
cat. Cats are wise and can debug most any program.

On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 at 17:51, Lux, Jim (337K) via Beowulf <
beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:

> This is somewhat off topic for the list, but what you are describing is a
> phenomenon known as “signaling” – that is, the possession of the degree
> isn’t strictly required for the task at hand (an autodidact could
> potentially do it), but that possession is a signal of other
> characteristics which are deemed desirable.
>
> And yes, most well-known folks in the “computer science” business up to
> around 1980 (well known in 1970 or 1980, I mean) most likely did not have a
> degree in CS, because they weren’t very many CS programs.  It is true that
> most had degrees in Math, Physics, Engineering though.
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
>
> *From: *Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org> on behalf of "
> beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> *Reply-To: *Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov>
> *Date: *Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 1:32 PM
> *To: *"beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> *Subject: *[EXTERNAL] Re: [Beowulf] Introduction and question
>
>
>
> Thanks for sharing this. I was recently asked for my input in a job
> description for a new position. They wanted to make the education
> requirements a minimum of a BS in Math, Physics, Engineering, or CS. I
> recommended that they DO NOT list any education requirements for this
> position, because most of the skills they were looking for (git, make
> files, GNU autoconf, CMake, etc.), are not taught in any college curriculum
> I know of, so a formal education is no guarantee of those skills. and some
> of the best sys admins and programmers I ever met  had no formal education
> in STEM, or at all.
>
> I was overruled.
>
> --
> Prentice
>
> On 3/21/19 5:08 AM, Benson Muite wrote:
>
> "Many employers look for people who studied humanities and learned IT by
> themselves, for their wider appreciation of human values."
>
> Mark Burgess
>
> https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/jesa_0201_issue.pdf
>
> On 2/23/19 4:30 PM, Will Dennis wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
>
>
> I thought I’d give a brief introduction, and see if this list is a good
> fit for my questions that I have about my HPC-“ish” infrastructure...
>
>
>
> I am a ~30yr sysadmin (“jack-of-all-trades” type), completely self-taught
> (B.A. is in English, that’s why I’m a sysadmin :-P) and have ended up
> working at an industrial research lab for a large multi-national IT company
> (http://www.nec-labs.com). In our lab we have many research groups (as
> detailed on the aforementioned website) and a few of them are now using
> “HPC” technologies like Slurm, and I’ve become the lead admin for these
> groups. Having no prior background in this realm, I’m learning as fast as I
> can go :)
>
>
>
> Our “clusters” are collections of 5-30 servers, all collections bought
> over years and therefore heterogeneous hardware, all with locally-installed
> OS (i.e. not trad head-node with PXE-booted diskless minions) which is as
> carefully controlled as I can make it via standard OS install via Cobbler
> templates, and then further configured via config management (we use
> Ansible.) Networking is basic 10GbE between nodes (we do have Infiniband
> availability on one cluster, but it’s fell into disuse now since the
> project that has required it has ended.) Storage is one or more traditional
> NFS servers (some use ZFS, some not.) We have within the past few years
> adopted Slurm WLM for a job-scheduling system on top of these collections,
> and now are up to three different Slurm clusters, with I believe a fourth
> on the way.
>
>
>
> My first question for this list is basically “do I belong here?” I feel
> there’s a lot of HPC concepts it would be good for me to learn, so as I can
> improve the various research group’s computing environments, but not sure
> if this list is for much larger “true HPC” environments, or would be a good
> fit for a “HPC n00b” like me...
>
>
>
> Thanks for reading, and let me know your opinions :)
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Will
>
>
>
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