[Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: Introduction and question

Fri Mar 22 22:07:21 PDT 2019

Fascinating, I’m working these days on projects having to do with RF propagation through the ionosphere, for which her papers are “seminal works”

From: John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com>
Date: Friday, March 22, 2019 at 1:48 PM
To: Jim Lux <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov>
Cc: Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov>, "beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: Introduction and question

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<mailto: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.

From: Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org>> on behalf of "beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>" <beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>>
Reply-To: Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov<mailto:pbisbal at pppl.gov>>
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 1:32 PM
To: "beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>" <beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto: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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