Chairman:		Tom Murphy (Contra Costa College)
Date:		March 28, 2003, 10-2 PM, AA-216
Present:		Charlie Verboom and Greg Kurtzer (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Derek Wise and Mark Graham (Global Netoptex, Inc) David Evensky (Sandia National Laboratory) Nina Berry (Sandia National Laboratory) Anu Chakichera (LBNL)
CCC Present:		Adeliza Flores
Pre-meeting handouts:		A packet of information containing minutes from the last meeting, course topic list for the HPC Program at CCC, and HPC slides.
Purpose of Meeting:		Participants of the meeting were surveyed about aspects of the labor market outlook for graduates of the High Performance Computing Degree Program at CCC. Participants of the meeting also discussed the potential contents of the HPC Practicum Course.
Labor Market Outlook for HPC Graduates:		Examples of Bay Area private companies and public facilities that use PC Cluster-based HPC: National Labs (Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia) Biotechnology (Incyte Genomics, Genentech, DOE Joint Genome Institute) Internet Search Engine Web Farms (Google, Ebay) Computer Graphics (Pixar, Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light and Magic) Oil/Petroleum (Chevron - Richmond and San Ramon) Meteorological Groups/Weather Stations (National Weather Service - NOAA) Computer Hardware, Software, and Services (IBM, Intel, Sun) Utility companies (PG E) Astronomical Observatories (Chabot Space and Science Center) Financial Companies (Bank of America, Schwab) Estimated number of PC-clusters in companies/labs represented in the meeting: LBNL: currently about 20 and will expand to 35 clusters. Also has NERSC with 6,656 nodes Sandia: 10 to 20 cluster that range in size from 16 nodes to hundreds of nodes NetOptex : anticipating 3 or 4 clusters in the future Estimated that one administrator is needed for every 200-300 nodes. Starting Salary Approximations: $20K for interns/$25-30K for entry-level Advancement Outlook: Depending on work performance, graduates with AS Degree have opportunities for advancement within companies or national labs up to the project management level or basic engineer level. Because of overlap of skills developed through the HPC program with other computer certification programs, HPC AS degree holders will have opportunities for lateral expansion of responsibilities. To optimize opportunities for advancement within company, a B.S. Degree is ideal. *Most of the members agree that the specialization offered by the HPC degree will provide some unique opportunities for graduates. Their special skills will be quite attractive to companies and other employers who are currently using and currently developing PC-cluster based HPC
HPC Practicum Course		This course will consist of mostly lab practical applications of concepts and skills learned from the following courses: A++ HARDWARE, HPC Intro, Intro to LINUX, LAN Network Design, and Router Configuration. This course will be designed to complete the students’ understanding of the overall arena of HPC before they proceed to specialization as System, Network, or Security Administrator or as Programming Assistants. Some of the suggested activities or topics of discussion for the course are: Assigning one computer per person is essential, especially when in groups, in order for students to be accountable for their knowledge and their demonstration of knowledge. A team of 4 students will assemble and install a working 4-node PC Cluster. This team activity will include complete installation of hardware, Linux OS, additional software. Students should then work on disassembly and reassembly of a working cluster. Possible sequence of tasks through the weeks of the course (given in cookbook form in practicum and explained in more detail in follow-on courses) Install working Linux. No networking. No OS. Troubleshooting to test students’ ability to fix a broken system (by teacher). Possible teacher tamperings are a bent pin on IDE cable and remove memory Create working cluster from scratch Install clustering tools MPI and test MPICH for performance monitoring PVS or Sun Grid Engine for batch submission Performance monitoring and running benchmarks. Practical applications of HPC, e.g. bioinformatics, animation. Canned exercise modules that demonstrate programs run by PC clusters, e.g. BLAST. Dr. Chakichera and Charles agree that specific case studies can be developed for practice use by HPC students Ripping an MP3 in parallel Optimization and Performance Tuning Have competition to see who can get fastest benchmark Create working cluster using toolkits Warewolf Rocks Oscar Skilld Web server farm load balancing DNS Linux Virtual Server Project (VHOST) Unbreakable Linux (if Oracle gives us license) Internet research to troubleshoot and solve standard software problems using Linux community as resource Some sample areas are MPI embarrassingly parallel error identification Set students up so they use the internet community to teach themselves something Maintain a public mailing list of student experiences that others can use. This is another way to help students understand the larger community when others use what they produce. May need a class on mailman so they can do this. Post archives of mailing list HTML class with canned set of exercises People like quick cheatsheets, almost like a FAQ. This will be good style of delivering some of this info to students. Later courses can elaborate on fine points. Virtual Hosting Parallel snooping and sniffing check of cybersecurity, cracking passwords, etc. Integration of 4-node PC cluster assembled by each team into a 24-node PC cluster This allows exploration of scaling, both advantages and disadvantages Copper vs fiber Gigabit Preview the courses which follow that specialize in system, network, or security administration or programming support. Lab Set-up Suggestions: Each team will work with a mobile station. Ideally, HPC program will have complete custody of an HPC-dedicated lab Use remo.able disk so students can be assigned their own disk.
HPC Internships		Charles Verboom brought an example of a job posting for a Community College Student Intern Position at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The Board proceeded to go over the job description and adapt it to an HPC Internship position. The Board decided that to make the internship positions more attractive to companies, the positions will not be restricted to working in an HPC environment. Other companies will be able to offer other relevant positions that are helpful toward a well-rounded experience for the HPC Program students, making use of the wide range of skills they have developed through classroom learning and the HPC Practicum Course. Some suggestions for internship hiring process: Have series of job descriptions of the internships so students can self-select based on their interests College will recommend students from the program. Prospective employers will interview selected students. Faculty acts as headhunter for the prospective employers Some skills to focus on Stress test via role play a student is put into Have section on resume writing A focus on soft skills should be integrated into all courses. However, the internship is a place to reinforce and focus in depth on the soft skills.
Other course changes:		Add a Samba module to Basic LINUX Administration course Add a basic HTML module to one of the course to give students some experience in reading HTML and using HTML to create documents
Other business:		Tom Murphy had individual discussion with David Evensky of Sandia regarding possible donation of Myrinet networking connections.
Date of next meeting:		May 9, 2003