July 6

PDSF Users Meeting 7/6/10

Attending: Eric and Jay from PDSF and users Andrei, Craig and Art.

Cluster status: Utilization has fairly heavy lately.

Outages: There was a recent outage with /home and ALICE jobs - not really clear what is going on - still debugging

Upcoming downtimes: The big shutdown is now scheduled to start July 27 at 7am and last through Friday afternoon the 30th.

New hardware: Jay got quotes from Dell for new nodes. Latest configuration Intel Westmere chips with 6 cores/socket. One issue to investigate is whether to allow 12 jobs/node or just 8. New nodes can have 2 or 4 GB memory/core and cost about $4500 per node with 4GB. Also buying the ALICE storrage. Got a quote for ATLAS but waiting for a requote.

Other Topics:

- Printing is working now for Art.

- Please do the NERSC survey if you haven't already.

- ATLAS update: working on grid transfers with Iwona.

- IDL: license server to be retired - might be able to move license to a new server - need to investigate

- We discussed the possibility of the batch system using some other file system besides /common. No changes planned for now.