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Meet the Devs – Edinburgh

The fourth and final instalment of the 2015 UK Spectrum Scale User Group “Meet the Devs” series recently took place in Edinburgh, and I had the privilege of helping Simon Thompson and Joe Taylor lead the discussions.

Not only was this my first “Meet the Devs” meeting, but it was also my first time spending any real time in Edinburgh (as is the case with most places I have visited lately). Joe and I took the first flight out of Manchester the morning of the event, and after a short taxi ride, we were at the University of Edinburgh.

As Simon mentioned, we had a mixed group of attendees – some new faces and some familiar faces. Some travelled a very short distance and one of the attendees flew in from Germany to meet and share ideas with us.

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Meet the Devs comes to Scotland

Well, this is the first time I’ve made it to a meet the devs meeting. And I chose probably the furthest location out from me, Edinburgh. But its the last of the Meet the Devs tour for 2015* and we like to have a User Group exec member present, so an early start and short flight later I was in Edinburgh. Hopefully we’ll be back in 2016 with some more meet the dev dates, we’ve managed 4 this year, which is about what we set out to do, once a quarter. If you are interested in meet the devs coming to your area, please get in touch with the group.

The event was well attended, and I’d like to thank Orlando for hosting us at University of Edinburgh.

As usual we went in with a general agenda, some topics to discuss but we let the informal sessions go where they want. There was a mixture of re-attendees and people who hadn’t been before, so its good to see people going back as it shows they must be getting value out of them. This time we had Rick Welp and Joseph Taylor from IBM, thanks to both for coming along and leading the day.

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Inaugural USA Meet the Devs

Well we did it, we held our first “Meet the Devs” in the US and I’ll venture to say it was successful. Let me emphasize the “we” involved in this event. This was a great joint effort between users and IBM with special thanks to Janet Ellsworth of IBM for all she did to make this event happen, and Doris Conti for making sure lots of IBMers, including lots of developers, came down from Poughkipsie. Thanks also to the US co-principal Bob Oesterlin and Pallavi Galgali for keeping things moving right along behind the scenes. We’ll see Bob and Pallavi in person at the SC15 meeting in Austin.

There’s a poll we’re running to get feedback from the attendees and we’ll see how my own feelings match up with the group’s. The discussion was lively, and everyone felt comfortable to ask direct questions and talk about it all —the good, the bad and the ugly.

From an attendee perspective there was reasonable diversity as well with representatives from financial, medical/genetics, and university sectors.

So, what was covered? I’m glad you asked.

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Performance Roundtable

Last Friday (25th Sept) Rick Welp and I held an informal “Spectrum Scale Performance” roundtable (although for the sake of transparency I must admit that the table was more rectangular than round). The chosen venue was IBM Southbank which neither of us had previously had the pleasure of visiting. The idea was to get together with a small number of GPFS/Spectrum Scale power users
and take advantage of their years of experience to gain insight into the kind of real world issues they deal with and more importantly what we can do to help mitigate them.

To add to that the idea of this post is to share some of the topics we discussed with the wider community and hopefully generate further discussion/ideas. We will look to hold another session, probably in Manchester, in the not too distant future and will be looking for willing participants.

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Meet the Devs #4

The fourth Meet the GPFS Developers ‘coffee shop’ meet has been announced.

The day will give members the opportunity to meet the developers and get hands on beta exploration and test of unreleased GPFS functions.

Date: 23rd October 2015

Time: 11am-3pm

Location: Room 2009a, Information Services, James Clerk Maxwell Building, Peter Guthrie Tait Road, Edinburgh EH9 3FD

Google maps link:
https://goo.gl/maps/Ta7DQ

Agenda: – GUI – 4.2 Updates/show and tell – Open conversation on any areas of interest attendees may have

Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Please register in advance with Claire O’Toole, GPFS User Group Secretary via email GPFS UG Secretary

We hope to see you there!