We take the approach that our cluster is "community managed" and discuss all aspects of managing it, software installs, problems, usage, scheduling, etc., in a dedicated slack.com instance for our center. Our group is 1 sysadmin (me), 1 applications person (my officemate) and about 200 users. To date this has worked really well. People can easily choose to monitor the relevant slack channels they are interested in, we get instant feedback for changes and problems, we can easily poll users for potential maintenance window scheduling and we've discovered that users are creating private channels for coordinating projects and discussing stuff we never imagined. As a bonus all our configs are checked into a subversion repo and any changes have the changelogs sent to slack so that anyone interested can instantly see any change to the clusters config and the comment associated with it. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for slack.com, between the web and phone apps providing access from just about any device or location where there is an internet connection and the level of adoption we've had from users, I've never encountered a better system for managing a community around a shared resource.
jbh On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 6:43 PM Christopher Samuel <sam...@unimelb.edu.au> wrote: > On 28/09/16 06:02, Rob Taylor wrote: > > > I wanted to ask how people announce new versions of software that has > > been installed on their cluster to their user base. > > We're pretty lucky, most users know to use "module avail" to see what's > there and given we tend to install a couple of new packages a day (yay > bioinformatics) any active update mechanism would probably be overwhelming. > > We did used to have a list of software on our website but it was > impossible to keep up to date. > > All the best, > Chris > -- > Christopher Samuel Senior Systems Administrator > VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative > Email: sam...@unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545 > http://www.vlsci.org.au/ http://twitter.com/vlsci > _______________________________________________ > 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 > -- ‘[A] talent for following the ways of yesterday, is not sufficient to improve the world of today.’ - King Wu-Ling, ruler of the Zhao state in northern China, 307 BC
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