CUG.Log

Operating Systems SIG Report

CUG SUMMIT 2001 "A Space Odyssey"

What a great CUG. JPL did a fantastic job of organizing the activities, and Palm Springs was beautiful. I don't think I've ever been anywhere where the weather was such a big topic of conversation. Thank You Larry Eversole for a job well done.

The Operating Systems Group has responsibility for the Unicos, Irix, Linux and Security focus groups. Tina Butler of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is the Unicos Focus Group Chair. Cheryl Wampler of the Los Alamos National Laboratory is the Irix Focus Group Chair. Virginia Bedford and Liam Forbes of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center Co-Chair the Security Focus Group Chair, and John Mulholland of the Communications Security Establishment chairs the Linux Focus Group. George Behnke, Operating Systems Leader, is our Cray Liaison, Lynne Johnson, the Engineering Director for Operating System Scalability, is our SGI Liaison.

With the new focus of both SGI and Cray on Linux, we have added a new Focus Group to the OS SIG in order to keep our Linux users abreast of the latest hardware and software technology in the Linux arena. All Linux related presentations in the 2000 SUMMIT were SRO events. This year we identified larger room requirements for our Linux presentations and they were all well attended. The Operating Systems Group is a very active group within CUG with timely feedback for our Vendors and the CUG Board and Advisory Council. Broad ranges of Irix, Linux, and Unicos Operating System knowledge and Security considerations were shared with the CUG membership.

SGI and Cray have both been very busy over the last year with SGI pursuing the Graphics and Scalar HPC markets and Cray pursuing the Vector HPC market.

SGI has added a whole passel of new features to IRIX including Job Limits, User Limits, Clustered XFS, and Comprehensive System Accounting. Administrative help with securing an Irix system was added in the form of scripts that automatically run to EZsetup and System Manager. Unfortunately, many HPC sites do not use these tools to administer their systems and haven't noticed these important tools.

Cray has leaped into the PC Cluster market with the SuperCluster, and will provide support for the Secure Shell on all their platforms. Cray SSH support is a strong statement! Unicos with an Irix Micro-Kernel will run on the SV-2 which is due out in late 2002 or early 2003. The Cray SuperCluster system really won't be a Cluster. Cray plans to run it on a Single System Image.

During the Open Meetings, we initiated a list of HPC requirements for Batch Queuing Systems which was completed over the following two weeks and forwarded to Cray, SGI, Platform Computing, and Veridian. These requirements were very timely for Cray who was in negotiations with Platform and Veridian for the system to support on all future Unicos systems.

The OS SIG serves three important functions. First, we provide SGI and Cray with valuable feedback that gives insight into our needs and desires, and helps them to continuously improve support to their customers. Second, we provide feedback to the CUG Advisory Council to help them continue to improve the CUG meetings. Third, we assist in the planning and technical content of the CUG general meetings and special workshops. From time to time I will ask the Operating Systems Group for feedback on specific issues that I will then summarize and present to SGI and Cray as our position (much like the issues identified above).

For those of you that do not know me, I have worked for Boeing since 1985. I have been on the support staff for our Cray Data Center since then and have also been administering SGI systems since the days of the 3000 series machines with Mex as the window manager, and the 2500 Turbos with the toaster oven sized 400 Megabyte Eagle disk drives. I have administered Boeing's Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab with about 50 SGI machines since 1988 when it was first built. I also went to Moscow, Russian Federation in 1993 to design and build a CFD Lab out of SGI Indigo R3000s and R4000s for the Central Aerodynamics Institute, Russia (TSAGI) engineers to use in working with Boeing to improve the performance of our aero codes. Most recently, I have been managing our Origin3800/64 and helping our Cray and Origin users with Fortran related vectorization and parallelization modifications to increase the performance of their programs.

Chuck Keagle
Boeing Enterprise Servers
chuck.keagle@boeing.com