It is nice to be back with the Cray User
Group (CUG) again as president. My good friend Claude Lecoeuvre is to be
thanked for the great job he did as president, and I am happy he is on
the board as our director-at-large (past president) for the next 18
months.
I want to welcome Sam Milosevich as the new vice president. Sam
has the biggest job in all of CUG, which is the program chair. We owe
a great thanks to Sally Haerer, who has been our vice president
for the past year. Sally did a wonderful job, and the program at Charlotte
was great.
Other changes on the board are that Barry Sharp is the new
director of the Americas (North, Central, and South) and Shigeki
Miyaji is director of Asia/Pacific (Asia, Australia, and New
Zealand). Many thanks for the long-running support of both Jean
Shuler and Rob Bell on the board. We will miss Jean's
wonderful smile, and we will miss Rob
too.
Gary Christoph remains as CUG treasurer, Gunter
Georgi remains as secretary, and Walter Wehinger
remains as director of Europe.
Amendments passed
The Fall 1996 CUG election in Charlotte, North Carolina, also resulted
in passage of three out of four proposed amendments to the CUG bylaws.
These changes accomplished the following:
- Amendment 1: This amendment updates the name of the new
organization, and in the process allows people with Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI)
computers to join CUG. While our name is still CUG, we are now in
fact, the SGI/Cray User Group.
- Amendment 2: This changes the requirement that we
have two meetings a year to only one meeting per
year. We have scheduled the CUG next meeting May
5-9, 1997, in San Jose, California. While there will be no large Fall 1997 CUG meeting,
there are ideas for smaller regional or local CUG meetings in areas
where there have been no such meetings. These smaller group meetings
would be similar to those held by the Latin CUG, the Japanese CUG, the
German CUG, and other groups in Australia and the UK. Stay tuned on
this one.
- Amendment 3: This extends the term of president and
vice president from one to two years. With the change to one meeting
a year, this modification was necessary.
As to proposed Amendment 4, the members voted "no" to the idea of
two classes of membership and sent the
board a strong message.
Thanks to Sally, Gunter, and Laney Kulsrud for making the
discussion of the proposed amendments part of the Future of CUG
meeting--and for the members and their vocal participation.
New committees formed
After the election, the board met and formed new committees as required
by the bylaws. New committees and members are:
-
Membership Committee: Gunter Georgi (chair), Barry Sharp,
Shigeki Miyaji, and Walter Wehinger
-
Publications Committee: Walter Wehinger (chair), Sam
Milosevich, and Claude Lecoeuvre
-
Finance Committee: Gary Jensen (chair), Gary Christoph,
and Gunter Georgi
-
Program Committee: Sam Milosevich (chair), Barry Sharp,
and Shigeki Miyaji
-
Advisory Committee: Claude Lecoeuvre, Gary Jensen, and
Sam Milosevich
-
Local Arrangements Committee: Gary Christoph (chair) and Gary
Jensen
Cray and CUG
The Cray Research, Inc. (CRI) executive representative to the CUG Board of Directors is René
Copeland, and CRI representative is Mary Amiot. I can't say
enough about Mary Amiot and her spirit: each of her efforts
is better than the last.
It's sad that the Charlotte CUG was Joan Palm's last, as
she has retired from Cray. We especially want to thank her for her
contributions to the CUG Office over the years and for her patience and
understanding. We learned a lot from Joan on running a business.
Please welcome the old Bob Winget as the new CUG Office support
person. You will see a lot more of Bob now.
I was grateful for the opportunity to give a short
tribute to Seymour Cray
at the Monday general session. You might also
want to check out the web page set up by Cray Research at
http://www.cray.com/PUBLIC/SEYMOUR/.
There is a great picture of Seymour that you can lift from your
browser's cache files and save for your own records. We can only
say "Thanks, Seymour."
CUG on the web
Let me thank Walter Wehinger for all the work he has
done in getting the CUG web pages sorted out and looking good. The web
site resides on a Sun workstation in Stuttgart, donated by Cray Germany
for this purpose. Check out the CUG home
page at http://www.cug.org and you will be impressed!
With Sam moving onto the CUG board, we needed a new editor for CUG.log;
thanks to Lynda Lester for standing up and taking over that
job. You can reach Lynda at
lester@ucar.edu.
The board committed Bob Winget to design a web-based entry point
for submitting papers for review. Look for this link soon on the
CUG home page.
Intel User Group
The Intel User Group, lacking a sponsor, held a meeting in late
summer, to discuss their future. The CUG board asked Sally
Haerer to attend and represent CUG. The Intel group seems headed
toward becoming a generic high-performance computing user group. We
will keep an eye on what develops there.
SGI and CUG
I was encouraged to meet and hear SGI chief executive officer and president Ed
McCracken say that "groups like this [CUG] are very valuable to
us." He indicated that he likes an active user group, and that SGI is
going to give CUG a lot of support.
SGI executives besides Ed McCracken
were in attendance at CUG: Mick Dungworth, whom we all know from
Cray, was there, as well as Steve Ursenbach (last known to be
vice president of North American Customer Support for SGI); and there
were others. This showed a beginning of the support Ed mentioned.
Ed also suggested that CUG help solve SGI's problems of today and out
as far as 2010. While that may be when Ed plans to retire, I take his
suggestion seriously and asked the Program Committee to set aside a
session at San Jose where we can try to brainstorm the future of Cray
and SGI, what we want and when we want it, and how to grow the
supercomputing market.
CUG needs to do as much as possible to create dialog with SGI/CRI and
expand the applications available to us. Our goals need to include
building the kind of relationship with SGI that we have worked hard to
develop with CRI. This needs to be a short-term goal, and we will need
to keep this in mind as we plan and develop programs in the next couple
of years. CUG recognized a new Mutual Interest Group (MIG) formed to
work with IRIX, with Nick Cardo
(cardo@nas.nasa.gov) as chair.
The future
Laney Kulsrud will continue with the Future
of CUG Committee, so if you have any ideas and are not already
working
with Laney, please get in touch with her
(laney@ccr-p.ida.org).
Please note the CUG treasurer's report in this issue of CUG.log. We are forecasting that
we will spend more next year than we bring in. That will result in a
drop in our reserves, and makes it important that each site pay
their dues. After reading this plea, please check to see if your site
has paid its
dues.
The next CUG executive symposium is scheduled for April 6-9, 1997, in
Scottsdale, Arizona. René Copeland, Mary Amiot, Vito Bongiorno, and I worked out
the rough draft of an agenda for that meeting.
The next CUG meeting will be held May 5-9, 1997, in San Jose, California, in the newly renovated DoubleTree Hotel (formerly the Red
Lion). The traditional CUG night out will take us to the Winchester Mystery
House in San Jose (see
http://www.netview.com/svg/tourist/winchest/). A buffet dinner will be held in
the beautiful gardens, and
tour guides will take us through this eerie but magnificent mansion.
A word used often by CRI president Bo Ewald in his
talks at the
Charlotte CUG was "premier." He used it to describe a number of
programs that SGI/CRI are working on. I like to think that CUG is the
premier user group for high-performance computing customers. Thinking
that we are premier will not make it happen, but you can make it
happen. Your participation, your efforts to contribute your time and
energy toward CUG, will bring us to premier status.
See you next time! In the meantime, contact
me by e-mail (guido@psc.edu).
|
by Gary Jensen
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