Last year in Helsinki marked the 30th anniversary of the Cray
User Group. The occasion was celebrated with a special cake during the
Cray Social. The very first CUG was held in Los Alamos in the Spring of
1978 and the ambitious planners managed two conferences per year
through the Fall of 1996. Over the thirty years, CUG has held 50
Conferences plus three product workshops. In those early days, the
planning cycle for the next Conference began approximately two weeks
after the close of a conference.
Conferences were scheduled at least two years (4 conferences)
into the future and rotated among North America, Europe and Asia. One
tradition that went away when the Conference frequency dropped to just
once a year was the Thursday afternoon Program Meeting. This meeting
was open to all attendees and was a brainstorming session to come up
with a conference theme for the conference a year out. The
sessions became fairly rowdy as insane suggestions passed around the
room but in the end it always provided a usable theme that both the
site and the planners could agree to.
In Stuttgart, Spring 1998, CUG member sites agreed to scale
meeting back to "at least one per year". This change allowed CUG to
host topical workshops, regional meetings and even a second full blown
Conference without another membership vote. Just about that time, SGI
bought out Cray Research, Inc. and the first topical workshop was held
in Denver focusing on the Origin 2000; later workshops focused on the
T3E and the SV1. Under pressure from SGI to change the name of
the organization - for somewhat obvious reasons - the Board of
Directors agreed to change the Conference name to the CUG SUMMIT and
held SUMMITs for several years.
Then SGI sold the T3E portion of the company to Cray, Inc. and
the Board spent the next several years trying to hold CUG together
while supporting both vendors. For those years the Conferences adapted
to a format of two days for each vendor and experimented with the
middle day. One year CUG held a full day of CUG business meeting,
SIG meetings and plenary talks where both vendors were present. Another
year, the middle day excluded all vendors. In 2002, the Board worked
with SGI executives to spin off the SGI user group activities from CUG.
Two Board members, whose sites housed SGI equipment, worked with SGI to
start up a new user group. CUG members without Cray equipment at the
time of the split were grandfathered into CUG for up to two years. In
2003, Columbus marked the return to "Classic CUG" as the T-shirts
proclaimed as CUG was back to supporting only a single vendor.
Although CUG is closely associated with Cray, Inc. and
supports member sites that operate and use Cray systems, it is a
separate entity incorporated in the state of Delaware. CUG is governed
by a Board of Directors, voted in by the membership, as if it were a
nonprofit corporation. Basically, conferences are run in an attempt to
break even financially and the organization targets a bank account that
would survive one totally failed conference.
CUG is run by volunteers who are financially supported by
their organizations. Members of the Board of Directors attend three
Board meeting per year. The Fall meeting is co-located with Cray
(usually in Seattle but has been in Minneapolis and once in Vancouver),
the other two board meetings are at the CUG Conference site. The first
is in winter and reviews the preparations for the Conference; the
second is prior to and following the Conference. SIG and Focus
chairs can do much of their work from their own site, traveling only to
the Conference. CUG always needs new volunteers and it is a very
rewarding experience. If you would like to be more involved, approach a
Board member to discuss the kinds of things that interest you.
Most CUG volunteers first get involved through self-nomination - get
involved!!
