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> 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@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
