by Barbara Horner-Miller
A ttendance at the User Services sessions in Charlotte was high and the quality of papers was excellent! We had three sessions in addition to our open meeting, and had our first presentation via computer network. The Mint Museum was delightful, and we saw several of our members dance the Macarena (led by Cray's Mary Amiot).
The User Services Special Interest Committee (SIC) business meeting was held on Monday afternoon and was, as always, open to all interested participants. The committee elected Leslie Southern from the Ohio Supercomputer Center as the new deputy chair. Leslie has been active in the Cray User Group (CUG) and the User Services SIC for several years, and it is a pleasure to have her onboard in an official capacity.Attending the open meeting is a good way to put names and faces together and to bring your favorite issue up for discussion. If you are unable to attend CUG or the open meeting, we will be glad to raise an issue on your behalf--just get word to one of us prior to the meeting.
Barb Brunzell, our committee's liaison with Cray Research, left Cray before this CUG. Rich Franta filled in as the Cray liaison for the Charlotte meeting, and Gary Sparks will assume that role while we evaluate the position and decide which area in Cray can best fit our needs: training, documentation, or user support. These areas are no longer under a single umbrella within the Cray structure. If you have an opinion on this issue, please get in touch with Leslie (leslie@osc.edu) or myself (horner@galaxy.jpl.nasa.gov).
As previously mentioned, our committee had an excellent CUG program. The general focus areas for this CUG: user interaction and infrastructure support tools were both in evidence in Charlotte. User interaction talks centered around outreach activities, including newsletters and training. Infrastructure issues included two talks by Cray on their new call-tracking system and their new World Wide Web documentation server. The talk on network-based education was presented live over the network in one of the earliest CUG demonstrations of that technology. The papers from these talks have been published in the official CUG conference Proceedings; titles are listed below:
- Creating a User Friendly Newsletter on the WWW
- Network-Based Education: Lessons Learned
- HTML Forms Data-Processing Tool
- NSRC's Outreach Experience
- Implementing CRUISE, the CRI Call/Problem Tracking Tool
- Distance Learning--Does it Work?
- A Cray WWW Document Server
The next CUG will be held May 1997 in the Silicon Valley. The theme, Seismic Supercomputing, was humorously depicted in a video prepared by Sterling Software, the contractor to the NASA Ames Research Center. I hope that you will be able to attend and share your ideas with the rest of us.
Comments to: lester@ucar.edu