The Cray User Group meeting in San Jose, officially named the "Silicon Valley CUG," was organized down to the last detail by David Robertson and Marcia Redmond of Sterling Software and their team. A special thanks to Dr. Hanson of Nasa Ames, and Russ Molari also of Sterling Software. A welcome surprise was that the e-mail room was open 24 hours a day during the conference. An impressive showing by these people, and a hard act for the chair of the next CUG meeting in Stuttgart to follow.The program committee and the chairs did a great job in providing a program that was outstanding.
CUG is in good health financially; see the treasurer's report in this issue. It is important that sites pay their dues and maintain their membership in CUG.
New people, procedures, ideas
A nominating committee headed by Jean Shuler was established for the election to be held at the Stuttgart meeting. Positions open will be for two-year terms and will include president, vice president, secretary, and the regional director of Europe. If you would like to be part of the nominating committee or to talk about running for one of these positions, please get in touch with Jean (shuler@cug.org).The Future of CUG Committee (FOC) headed by Laney Kulsrud has some up with some suggestions to make CUG better and position it for the future. One that was approved by the Board of Directors combines Mutual Interest Groups (MIGs) and Special Interest Committees (SICs) into a new category we are calling Special Interest Groups (SIGs). For now, we are applying to them the rules set up in the policy for Special Interest Committees (SICs). By the next meeting, the FOC will have a definition for a SIG and we can then work that into the policy and replace the one currently there for a SIC.
The FOC Committee also suggests reworking some of the other policies to update the organization for the future.
There was some discussion about holding a contest at each CUG meeting for the best paper; one suggestion was to call it the Seymour Cray Award. Dan Drobnis and his friends came up with a good straw man proposal; however, the board, in discussing how to judge it and whether to judge the presentation or the written paper, could not come up with an answer that made us comfortable. If you have any ideas on this that would pass a basic logic test, please send them to me (guido@ncsa.uiuc.edu) ).
We are working on ways to increase CUG membership. Fran Pellegrino is calling all new Cray sites to talk them into joining.
The CUG board supported moving the Proceedings to CD-ROM, so look for that in the future. See the CUG office report in this issue for more details.
Implications of the Origin2000
We decided to hold a meeting this fall to discuss the Origin2000 and what it needs to make it fit into CUG. (See the request for participation in this issue.) We will invite Origin users and Cray to sit down and discuss how to take the service, software, and hardware into the same playing field that we have the Cray equipment in currently. We are still working on dates; at present, it looks like mid- to late October in Minneapolis. Cray has agreed to support this meeting with Cray folks that can help us see what needs to be done. This reminds me of CUG in the mid 1980s and where we were going then.Mary Kay Bunde of Cray Research is working on the program. We expect to have one day of customer talks and one day of Cray talks, all focused on the Origin2000. If you are interested in this, please send me e-mail (guido@ncsa.uiuc.edu) ) so we can make sure you hear about it when the dates and program are set.
We also need to begin a SIG for the Origin2000. If you are interested in chairing such a group at CUG and getting a program together that is interesting and useful, please get in touch with me. This area needs a champion to represent user/customer needs and work them through.
Ed McCracken, CEO of Silicon Graphics, Inc., said that SGI's business was currently broken into three nearly equal parts: supercomputers, servers, and graphics. The opportunity for us to expand CUG to accommodate more CUG members lies directly on our ability to work toward an organization that is ready for Scalable Node architecture (SN1) when SN1 is ready for us.
We need to bring in Origin2000 users now and provide the value-added services we have provided over the years for Cray customers. Now that the big Origin2000 systems have become a part of the responsibilities of the Cray side of the house, we need to work hard to look at that system and bring it into the mainstream of CUG. Forward your ideas to me or any member of the CUG board.
Stuttgart in '98
I hope to see you at the next CUG meeting in Stuttgart. Having Walter Wehinger as the Local Arrangements Chair means that the meeting will have a lot of surprises. One of the first surprises was meeting Grethe Knapp-Christiansen, who will handle most of Walter's work on this meeting, I am sure. Now we can relax, knowing Grethe is on the job.See you then!
