CUG.Log

Communications and Data Management SIG Report

The most recent CUG SUMMIT was fairly quiet for the Communications and Data Management SIG. With only a few talks, the main focus of this year's presentations were on SGI's DMF product and its futures. Brian Gaffey made an excellent tutorial on XFS and CXFS. Paul Ernst did another tutorial on the differences between UNICOS and IRIX versions of DMF.

Although many exciting things are happening in the data management and communications area, the excitement seems to wane as it approaches HPC environments.

A good portion of the one-hour SIG session was spent trying to get topics for possible presentations at next year's CUG SUMMIT meeting. The SIG attendees would like to get a storage futures presentation by SGI and Cray. The vendors were receptive to this idea as long as the other vendor was not in the room (or, possibly, the same hotel). Additional talks on SANS were recommended, as well as getting information from Cray, Inc. on the IO plans for the SV2.

It looks as though we may need to plan for two separate SIG meetings during the conference week, one for each vendor.

A plea was made for someone to step up and volunteer to be the focus chairperson for Network. Paul Anderson for the US-DOD stepped up to the challenge. I look forward to working with Paul and to having some network presentations and the next meeting.

A final SIG action was the election of Kevin Wohlever as the Communications and Data Management SIG. Jeff Terstriep moved to be the Mass Storage focus chairman.

Kevin Wohlever
Ohio Supercomputer Center
kevin@osc.edu