T E C H   R E P O R T S

New Operating Systems SIG report

Group will provide technical feedback to SGI . . .

Chuck Keagle, chair of the new Operating Systems SIG

by Chuck Keagle There were big changes in the Special Interest Group (SIG) structure at this year's CUG. The twelve SIGs were consolidated into five "super" SIGs, each of which has responsibility over several Focus Groups. (For details on the restructuring, see "CUG SIGs get a facelift" and A guide to the new CUG SIGs.") The new SIG and Focus Groups The new Operating Systems SIG has responsibility for the Unicos, Irix, and Security Focus Groups. Ingeborg Weidl of the Max Planck Institute, Germany, is chair of the new Unicos Focus Group. Cheryl Wampler of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA, is chair of the new Irix Focus Group. Virginia Bedford of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks, Alaska, USA, is chair of the new Security Focus Group. I would like to welcome Ingeborg, Cheryl, and Virginia to their new roles and look forward to working with them in the Operating Systems SIG. I would also like to acknowledge Sergio Bernardi of CINECA, Italy. He expressed an eagerness to get more involved in CUG as a deputy chair. There are no deputy chairs in the new structure, but I will see that his desires are satisfied. Finally, I would like to thank the previous IRIX SIG chair, Nicholas Cardo, for nurturing the natural creativity of this group and helping to pave the way for me to get more involved with CUG. Transition between old and new SIGs The old Operating Systems SIG always contributed generously to CUG, and this year was no exception. A broad range of both Irix and Unicos operating systems knowledge and security considerations were shared with CUG members. I feel fortunate to have been appointed to lead such an active group in its new form. I see the new SIG continuing to be active in the sharing of their knowledge and experiences with CUG members. This is the heart of CUG. Another important function for this group will be to provide technical feedback to SGI to help them gain an insight into our needs and desires and maintain their leading role in high-performance computing. Our third role will be to 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 SIG for feedback on specific issues that I will then summarize and present to SGI as our position. This feedback is important to help SGI continue to meet the needs of the CUG membership and the high-performance computing community in general. SGI advances SGI/Cray continues to make progress in the merger of the two companies. The most significant advancements announced this year were as follows: The merging of the Clarify and Cruise Data Bases and their user interfaces (SiliconSurf and CRInform respectively) into some new product soon to be announced. At the San Jose CUG last year, SGI/Cray responded favorably to our concern about the lack of vector processing in their roadmap. They now have two distinct product lines, one for scalar processing (Origin2000, SN1, SN2, ...) and one for vector processing using a vector register cache (SV1, SV2, ...). Cray-style accounting is coming to Irix in early 1999! Yipee -- job level accounting in IRIX! What a concept! Ideas for improving CUG A number of great ideas for improvements to the CUG were voiced at the open session: The various e-mail lists (unicos-l, o2k-system-l, o2k-apps-l, o2k-general-l, and gigaring) will be combined into two lists, one for technical discussions and one for CUG administrative discussions. In future CUGs, we could be seeing tutorials on Irix internals and system tuning with Origin-based tuning parameters. The seeds have been planted. There was concern that some SGI presentations were at too broad a level for this audience, and that some SGI presenters were not technically knowledgeable enough on the subject matter to present the material adequately and answer our questions. SGI will try to bring more technical content to future presentations. There will still be broad-level presentations, but the overall mix will be more directed toward the technical expertise of the CUG membership. We have developed a wish list for future SGI presentations. So far the list consists of future operating system plans, more on multistreaming processors, and current UNICOS/IRIX plans. This list will be presented to SGI prior to the next call for papers deadline. Please feel free to add to this wish list by sending your ideas to me (chuck.keagle@boeing.com). I plan to submit the list for the Minnesota CUG to our SGI liaison in the October/November time frame. Pleased to meet you . . . 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 massive 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 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 design new aero codes. Most recently, I have been managing our Origin2000/8 and helping our Cray and Origin users with Fortran-related program modifications to increase the performance of their programs.

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