May 2016 UK User Group

The UK May user group will take place over two days on 17th and 18th May 2016 at the IBM Client Centre in South Bank, London. We’d like to thank IBM and our sponsors for supporting the event and the evening networking/social event on the evening of 17th May 2016.
As usual we’ll have a packed agenda with speakers from the IBM development teams, user talks as well as technical talks from our sponsors. This is the first year we’ve run a two day user group event, so we’re hoping it’ll be a great event with more talks and networking opportunities than ever before! And in addition to that, we’ve planned a networking/social event just a few minutes walk from the user group venue where we’ll have food, drinks, pool, ping-pong, bowling and tokens for the machines and bumper cars! … Anyone for an IBM vs tournament?

Slides

The slides from the day are now available on the presentations page.

The agenda for the day is a bit further down the page…

Sponsors

We’d very much like to thank the following sponsors for supporting the user group meeting by providing funding to support the evening social event:

ArcaStream
DDN
IBM
Lenovo
Mellanox
NetApp
OCF
Seagate

Agenda

Day 1 – 17th May 2016

10:00 Registration & Coffee
10:30 Opening & Welcome – Simon Thompson & Claire O’Toole
10:45 Keynote talk – Doris Conti
11:05 4.2 Roadmap & 2016 Priorities, Ulf Troppens
11:35 Deep Dive – 4.2 GUI & Live Demo, Markus Rohwedder
12:05 Sponsor Talk 1 – Seagate: Using Spectrum Scale in the IoT World, Ray Coetzee
12:25 Lunch & Networking
13:25 Sponsor Talk 2 – ArcaStream: Python API & Demo, Jez Tucker
14:00 User Talk 1 – NCAR’s Globally Accessible Data Environment, Pamela Gillman, NCAR
14:20 Sponsor Talk 3 – NetApp: TBC, Mohinder Toor
14:40 User Talk 2 – Milk flows freely from London to Cardiff with AFM, Dave Goodbourn, Milk Visual Effects
15:00 Deep Dive – Hadoop Integration, Piyush Chaudhary
15:30 Coffee Break
16:00 Sponsor Talk 4 – Mellanox: Accelerating storage functions in a co-design network, Darren Harkins
16:20 Technical Deep Dive – Tiering to the Cloud / MC Store, Robert Basham
16:50 Technical Deep Dive – Problem Determination Enhancements, Mathias Dietz
17:50 Wrap-up
18:00 Finish
18:30 Evening Social Event – Namco Funscape

Day 2 – 18th May 2016

09:00 Arrival & Coffee
09:30 Parallel Talk Session

  • Talk 1: Licensing, David Cremise
  • Sponsor Talk 5 – OCF: Scale out NAS for the masses, Laurence Horrocks-Barlow
10:00 Parallel Breakout/workshop session 1

  • Spectrum Scale ILM & Spectrum Archive, Nils Haustein (introductory)
  • Metadata sizing / tuning, Indulis Bernsteins, Madhav Ponamgi (advanced)
  • Upcoming GUI Enhancements / I have a Spectrum Scale question, Markus Rohwedder, Sven Oehme, Olaf Weiser
11:00 Parallel Breakout/workshop session 2

  • AFM Introduction and use cases, Madhav Ponamgi (introductory)
  • Spectrum Protect Integration & Best Practices, Nils Haustein (Backup and HSM) (advanced)
  • Upcoming GUI Enhancements / I have a Spectrum Scale question, Markus Rohwedder, Sven Oehme, Olaf Weiser
12:00 Parallel Breakout/workshop session 3

  • Encryption / Compression, Olaf Weiser, Yoann Lechevallier (introductory)
  • Spectrum Protect with Spectrum Scale, Nils Haustein (Backup and HSM) (advanced)
  • Upcoming GUI Enhancements / I have a Spectrum Scale question, Markus Rohwedder, Sven Oehme, Madhav Ponamgi
13:00 Lunch & Networking
14:00 Sponsor Talk 6 – DDN: Adventures in AFM, Vic Cornell
14:20 Deep Dive – OpenStack Integration, Gaurang Tapase
15:00 Sponsor Talk 7 – IBM: Life Sciences, Frank Lee
15:20 Coffee Break
15:50 Sponsor Talk 8 – Lenovo, Michael Hennecke
16:10 A look into the future by IBM Research, Sven Oehme
17:10 Wrap-up and feedback
17:30 Finish

Registration

To register for this year’s event, please use our EventBrite event page at:
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/spectrum-scale-gpfs-user-group-spring-2016-tickets-21724951916

Registration opens for users from 14th March 2016.

Please note that we are currently limiting registrations to 3 per organisation to ensure as many organisations as possible are able to attend and places are strictly limited due to room capacity. We will be operating a wait list, so if you can’t get a ticket now, then we’ll hold details in case they become available nearer the date.

May User group meeting … save the date!

The next UK user group meeting will be held on May 17th and 18th 2016. This will be our first venture into a two day event and we still have a fun packed agenda!

We’ll be opening user registrations in mid March, so check back for registration details and agenda then.

We’d like to thank our sponsors from ArcaStreamDDNIBMLenovoNetAppMellanox and OCF for supporting the user group with speakers and supporting the evening networking/social event on 17th.

ArcaStream
DDN
IBM
Lenovo
Mellanox
NetApp
OCF
Seagate

GPFSUG @Computing Insight UK

This week was Computing Insight UK (CIUK) (formerly MEW), which is an annual HPC conference organised by STFC. For those not familiar, its like ISC or SC. Just on a much smaller scale – its a very different show to the major international events and I like being able to walk across the show floor (in 2 minutes) and also knowing ~60-70% of the people there… (and playing which sales person has changed vendor this year is a fun game).

As part of the programme for CIUK, we got a 2 hour “UG@” meeting in, but still we had a packed agenda. Although I’ve been chair of the group for a while, this is the first proper UK general meeting that I’ve been involved in organising so it was with a little trepidation that I took on booking the agenda! Luckily I have Claire to help – organising telecons, chasing me and others to help make sure it works on the day.

Continue reading “GPFSUG @Computing Insight UK”

Spectrum Scale UG @Computing Insight UK Agenda available

The Spectrum Scale user group will be meeting at Computing Insight UK (formerly MEW) in December 2015 at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry. The agenda is now available:

  • 10:00 Welcome & Introductions (Simon Thompson, GPFS UG Chair & Claire O’Toole, GPFS UG Secretary
  • 10:05 – Introducing Spectrum Scale 4.2 (Patrick Byrne, Cameron McAllister & Sarfraz Nadeem, IBM UK labs)
    • GUI demo
    • New features – compression and QoS
    • Where we are heading next with 4.2.1 onwards … problem determination focus
  • 11:00 – How to ruin a perfectly good GPFS file system (Vic Cornell, DDN)
  • 11:20 – The Unique Technical Benefits of an Engineered Solution for GPFS (Chris Weeden, Seagate)
  • 11:40 – Networking, Discussion & Feedback
  • 12:00 – Finish

Please note you must be registered for CIUK to attend this meeting.

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.

Continue reading “Meet the Devs – Edinburgh”