by Jean Shuler
T he J90 Mutual Interest Group meeting was heavily attended by those who had a cluster of J90s, had additional Cray hardware, or had been long-time Cray customers. There were only a few attendees who were new to CUG and came to get information about getting started on a J90. Unfortunately, there was not as much information for these new J90 sites as these attendees would have liked. We will try to provide a better spectrum of useful topics in forthcoming CUG meetings.A lively discussion centered around details such as adding peripheral devices and the availability of other vendor's compatible hardware. The "round-the-room" discussion brought out common concerns on performance issues and file system problems. Descriptions of how each customer site configured and used their systems was informative to others, and Cray Research representatives were there to respond to questions and problems that had been encountered.
Installation of UNICOS 9.0 was discussed; many sites had not installed this version for various reasons.
Michelle Webster, the Cray representative to the J90 MIG, responded to CUG customer questions and talked about continued support and enhancements to the J90s. Michelle's e-mail address is maw@cray.com.
Gary Smith from the University of Texas in Austin will be the new deputy chair for the J90 MIG. He has been associated with CUG for many years. His e-mail address is g.smith@cc.utexas.edu.
The J90 specific sessions were announced, and everyone was encouraged to attend these talks. There was a specific session on J90 file systems that generated a great deal of interest and attendance.
Future meeting topics were discussed and some of the suggestions were:
- Integration of third-party devices
- Configuring file systems
- Performance and tuning
Comments to: lester@ucar.edu