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---+ Project Development Meeting 
---+(JCMB Room 2511)- Minutes 2007-07-04
Present: Paul Anderson, Toby Blake, Neil Brown, Tim Colles, Ken Dawson (convener and minutes), Ian Durkacz, Stephen Quinney, Gordon Reid, Craig Strachan

Apologies: Alastair and George had sent their apologies.

---++ 1. Minutes of last meeting

These were accepted.

---++ 2. Matters Arising

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/48][Transition of Informatics staff mail services to Staffmail]] - The action is now on all computing staff to make the move and report any problems to the Services Unit for collation.

Seventeen out of the twenty seven computing staff had now moved their mail service to staffmail.

There are still about six staff who nedd to move to staffmail. *[Action the remaining ~6 staff]*
 
   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/30][802.1X and RADIUS]] This had slipped slightly; George will mail revised milestone dates to CEG.

Carried forward *[Action George]*

All other actions from the last meeting have been completed.

---++ 3. Approved Projects

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/75][Revisit Account Management]] and [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/70]["Friend" lightweight authentication system]]

These two projects required milestones but that will need to wait until Simon is back. *[Action Simon]*

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/3][Production Cosign Service]] It was agreed that Toby may postpone the milestone cosignCOTesting till 1st August and the milestone production serv till 15th August. The latter milestone should mention the global Firefox configuration changes to support SPNEGO. Toby had been held up by the need to work on LDAP issues. *[Action Toby]*

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/6][Production Condor Service]] Iain had produced  a draft of the documentation but still needed to publish the final version. *[Action Iain]*

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/11][Publishing and Discussion Media Survey Paper]] Gordon reported that the survey had been designed but that the milestones that should also have been  postponed had not yet been changed. These milestones should be postponed appropriately. *[Action Craig/Gordon]*

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/22][System Monitoring]] Simon reported via email that he had essentially written all the code for the monitoring system. Ian reported that the two servers on which the monitoring system would be built have arrived and that one had been installed in the Appleton Tower server room. *[Action Simon/Infrastructure Unit]*

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/26][Infrastructure for Appleton Tower Refurbishment]] George will update these after his meeting about the Appleton Tower ongonig work. *[Action George]*

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/27][Introduce a Production FC5 Desktop]] Iain has yet to produce the final version of this report *[Action Iain]*

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/62][Inf FC6 desktop]] Stephen reported that the final milestone had been achieved and that he would be talking to Alastair on his return about moving this project to the Sign Off stage. *[Action Stephen]*

It was agreed that the following project could be moved to the Completed stage since the previous objection from Alastair had now been met as a by-product of the change of authentication method from KX509 to Cosign carried out by Toby and Neil:

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/1][Project management System]]

The following project was signed off by the Development Meeting and goes to CEG for ratification:

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/20][IGS Database Work]]

---++ 4. New project proposals

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/72][Proof General Eclipse Improvements]].

There was some discussion of how this grant-funded project might usefully be monitored within the Development Meeting since it will be monitored by the PI and Tim separately from any Development Meeting involvement. It was agreed that Tim would enter milestones retrospectively and record how much effort had been expended.

It was agreed that this project should move straight to the implementation phase.

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/73][Cluster Parallel filesystem]].

Iain explained that NFS was becoming a bottleneck for cluster computing on the beowulf clusters. Since ECDF (Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility) was going to use GPFS (IBM's General Parallel File System) it would make sense to align our cluster file system with ECDF so that our researchers could move data easily between them and/or access either  file spsce from either cluster. Iain would be working closely with Orlando Richards of ECDF to avoid any duplication of effort. Neil raised the question of backups and Iain stated that initially at least the file space would not be backed up i.e. it would be the user's responsibility to back up their data. The GPFS kernel module should be available for Scientific Linux 5 by about September according to contacts at IBM. If Scientific Linux 5 is used in future for our beowulf clusters then there would be a dependency on the Managed Platform Unit porting LCFG to SL5, but it is possible that the GPFS kernel module's dependency is more on the gcc compiler than the kernel itself, in which case there is a possibility that it could be run on FC5.

It was agreed that this project should move to the evaluation phase.

---++ 5. Technical presentation and discussion of projects

   * [[https://devproj.inf.ed.ac.uk/project/show/28][Gridengine Configuration Review]] - Iain gave a presentation [[http://www.dice.inf.ed.ac.uk/units/research_and_teaching/documentation/unit/beowulf/gridengine_presentation3.odp][Open Document Presentation (ODP)]] and [[http://www.dice.inf.ed.ac.uk/units/research_and_teaching/documentation/unit/beowulf/gridengine_presentation3.pdf][PDF]].
.

---++ 6. AOB

The next meeting will be on August 1st in the Seminar Room Buccleuch Place.

-- Main.KenDawson - 04 Jul 2007
Topic revision: r3 - 06 Jul 2007 - 12:14:01 - KenDawson
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