[gpfsug-discuss] User group update

[GPFS UG Chair (Simon Thompson)]

Hi,

I thought I'd drop an update to the group on various admin things which
have been going on behind the scenes.

The first US meet the devs event was held yesterday, and I'm hoping
someone who went will be preparing a blog post to cover the event a
little. I know a bunch of people have joined the mailing list since then,
so welcome to the group to all of those!


** User Group Engagement with IBM **

I also met with Akhtar yesterday who is the IBM VP for Technical Computing
Developments (which includes Spectrum Scale). He was in the UK for a few
days at the IBM Manchester Labs, so we managed to squeeze a meeting to
talk a bit about the UG. I'm very pleased that Akhtar confirmed IBMs
commitment to help the user group in both the UK and USA with developer
support for the meet the devs and annual group meetings. I'd like to
extend my thanks to those at IBM who are actively supporting the group in
so many ways.

One idea we have been mulling over is filming the talks at next year's
events and then putting those on Youtube for people who can't get there.
IBM have given us tentative agreement to do this, subject to a few
conditions. Most importantly that the UG and IBM ensure we don't publish
customer or IBM items which are NDA/not for general public consumption.
I'm hopeful we can get this all approved and if we do, we'll be looking to
the community to help us out (anyone got digital camera equipment we might
be able to borrow, or some help with editing down afterwards?)

Whilst in Manchester I also met with Patrick to talk over the various
emails people have sent in about problem determination, which Patrick will
be taking to the dev meeting in a few weeks. It sounds like there are some
interesting ideas kicking about, so hopefully we'll get some value from
the user group input.

Some of the new features in 4.2 were also demo'd and for those who might
not have been to a meet the devs session and are interested in the
upcoming GUI, it is now in public beta, head over to developer works for
more details:
  
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/html/topic?id=4dc34bf1-
17d1-4dc0-af72-6dc5a3f93e82&ps=25



** User Group Feedback **

Over the past few months, I've also been collecting feedback from people,
either comments on the mailing list, or those who I've spoken to, which
was all collated and sent in to IBM, we'll hopefully be getting some
feedback on that in the next few weeks - there's a bunch of preliminary
answers now, but a few places we still need a bit of clarification.

There's also some longer term discussion going on about GPFS and cloud (in
particular to those of us in scientific areas). We'll feed that back as
and when we get responses we can share.

We'd like to ensure that we gather as much feedback from users so that we
can collectively take it to IBM, so please do continue to post comments
etc to the mailing list.


** Diary Dates **

A few dates for diaries:
  * Meet the Devs in Edinburgh - Friday 23rd October 2015
  * GPFS UG Meeting @ SC15 in Austin, USA - Sunday 15th November 2015
  * GPFS UG Meeting @ Computing Insight UK, Coventry, UK - Tuesday 8th
December 2015 (Note you must be registered also for CIUK)
  * GPFS UG Meeting May 2015 - IBM South Bank, London, UK- 17th/18th May
2016


** User Group Admin **

Within the committee, we've been talking about how we can extend the reach
of the group, so we may be reaching out to a few group members to take
this forward. Of course if anyone has suggestions on how we can ensure we
reach as many people as possible, please let me know, either via the
mailing list of directly by email.
I know there are lot of people on the mailing list who don't post
(regularly), so I'd be interested to hear if you find the group mailing
list discussion useful, if you feel there are barriers to asking
questions, or what you'd like to see coming out of the user group - please
feel free to email me directly if you'd like to comment on any of this!


We've also registered spectrumscale.org to point to the user group, so you
may start to see the group marketed as the Spectrum Scale User Group, but
rest assured, its still the same old GPFS User Group ;-)


Just a reminder that we made the mailing list so that only members can
post. This was to reduce the amount of spam coming in and being held for
moderation (and a few legit posts got lost this way). If you do want to
post, but not receive the emails, you can set this as an option in the
mailing list software.

Finally, I've also fixed the mailing list archives, so these are now
available at:
  http://www.gpfsug.org/pipermail/gpfsug-discuss/

Simon
GPFS UG, UK Chair