Wrap up of the second Spectrum Scale user group in Australia – April 2017 – Sydney, Australia

Hi there, it has been a busy time for us here in Australia, and we have had some fantastic Usergroup events.
Apologies for not posting my blogs earlier.

I’d like to write about the event we had on the 26th and 27th April in Sydney.

Sydney saw our best-attended event so far with 29 registered attendees and speakers.

We had kind sponsorship from Mellanox and IBM Australia and we were hosted in the IBM offices in North Sydney, wonderfully close to good coffee and food and the train!

On Wednesday we kicked off with a fabulous whiskey and cheese night event hosted by Mellanox to allow some time to meet and discuss many aspects of operating Spectrum Scale, new projects and make connections nationally.

Thursday we had topics and speakers on:
RDMA and beyond, Faster Interconnect for Spectrum Scale – Avi Telyas – Director, System Engineering, APAC, Mellanox.

Meet the IBM GPFS Developers – presentations and open discussion on GPFS – questions and answers – by Kedar M Karmarkar, Storage – Spectrum Scale Dev (Customer Enablement), IBM India Systems Development Lab, Pune

MeDiCI: UQ’s Metropolitan Data Caching Infrastructure – David Abramson, Director of Research Computing, University of Queensland

TSM/Spectrum Protect Advanced settings for GPFS backups – by Jeff Jiang, The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

We had many questions and answers through the day from attendees on a range of technical areas and details pertaining to Spectrum Scale, AFM and networking best practise. The afternoon session was very useful, attendees submitted detailed questions and the panel of experts answered these or took them away to be answered later director or at the next Usergroup.
So we now organise sessions in follow up user groups on topics that our attendees have asked for more detail on. It’s working well as we can arrange for speakers with expertise in that area to attend and deliver an interactive presentation.
Examples are the TSM tuning parameters deep dive (Jeff@Pawsey), the RDMA and IB presentation from Avi (Mellanox) and the Developers meet and discuss opportunity with Kedar(IBM).

I’d like to thank in particular for their outstanding help and support, Andrew Beattie (IBM), Eric Wong (IBM), Sudarshan Ramachandran (Mellanox) and all our fabulous speakers for their time and effort.
I will endeavour to have available presentations and/or videos of talks given. Unfortunately, not all presentations may be published as some include details under NDA or contain materials not for public dissemination (so you need to come along to the Usergroups in person for some content and discussion subjects).

Please feel free to attend or contact me further if you wish to speak at the next Spectrum Scale Usergroup in October in Brisbane, Australia in the week for eResearch http://goo.gl/JEEgkv