12:00-1:30 Registration - Wilson Hall Atrium South End

1:30 Opening Session - Chaired by Dane Skow (FNAL)

Opening - Goals of the Workshop - Alan Silverman (CERN) and Dane Skow (FNAL)

2:15 LHC Computing Needs - Wolfgang Von Rueden (CERN)

3:00 The IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing and Directions in Scalable Clusters - Bill Gropp (ANL)

3:30 Break

4:00 Panel on Usage Cases - FNAL, BNL, BaBar, Non-HEP

Panelists:

Panel Chair: Dane Skow

• Tom Yanuklis Talk (RHIC)
• Charles Young Talk (BaBar)
• Steve Wolbers Talk (FNAL)
• James Cuff Talk (The Sanger Centre)
• Ralf Gerhards Talk (H1 at DESY)
• Atsushi Manabe Talk (Kek)
• Jim Simone Talk (TH QCD at Fermilab)

For Each Site:

• A Brief Description of Each Cluster
• Its Size
• Its Architecture
• What it is used for
• Any Special Features
• What decisions/accomodations (architecture, hardware etc) did you make because of any special nature of the applications to be run.
• What Optimizations Did You Make

5:30 End of Day 1

9:00 - 10:30 Clusters at Large Sites

Chairman - Steve Wolbers

• CERN Clusters of Today - Tim Smith (CERN)
• BNL and other large clusters - Steve DuChene (VA Linux)
• The SLAC Computer Centre - Chuck Boeheim

10:50 Panel on Hardware Issues

Selection Criteria, Life Cycles, Cluster Heterogeneity Etc...

Chairwoman: Lisa Giachetti

Panelists

• Tom Yanuklis Talk (BNL)
• Thomas Davis (LBNL) The PDSF Operational Model) (ppt) ( HTML)

Seed Questions:

• What criteria are used to select hardware - price, price performance, compatibility with another site, in-house expertise, future evolution of the architecture, network interconnect, etc. Obviously all of these may play a role - which are the 3 most important in order of significance.
• Do you perform your own benchmarking of equipment?
• How do you handle life-cycles of the hardware? For example, the evolution of Pentium processors where later configurations and generations may need a new system image.
• Have you experience, positive or negative, with heterogeneous clusters

1:00 Parallel Sessions I

Parallel Session A1 - Cluster Design, Configuration Management

Chairman - Thomas Davis (LBNL)

Panelists:

• John-Paul Navarro (ANL) (Chiba City)
• Shane Cannon (LBNL) (PDSF and the Alvarez clusters)
• Joshua Harr (Linux NetworX)

Seed Questions:

• Do you use modeling tools to design the cluster?
• Do you use a formal database for configuration management?

Chairman: Don Petravick (FNAL)

Panelists:

• James Cuff (Sanger Inst)
• Doug Thain (Wisconsin) (Condor I/O)
• Kors Bos Talk (NIKHEF)
• Chris Dwan Talk (Minnesota)

Seed Questions

• Size of the data store and tools in use

3:30 Parallel Sessions II

Parallel Session A2 - Installation, Upgrading, Testing

Chairman: Steven Timm (FNAL)

Panelists

• Atsushi Manabe Talk (KEK) (Dolly++)
• Philip Papadopoulos (San Diego) (Rocks)
• Jarek Polok (CERN) (Work in progress for DatGRID)

Seed Questions:

• Do you buy-in installation services? From the supplier or a third-party vendor?
• Do you buy pre-configured systems or build your own configuation?
• Do you upgrade the full cluster at one time or in rolling mode?
• Do you perform formal acceptance or burn-in tests?

Chairman - Jim Amundson

Panelists:

• David Bigagli
• Charles Young (BaBar)

Seed Questions:

• Batch queueing system in use?
• Turnaround guarantees?
• Pre-allocation of resources?

5:30 End of Day 2 Working Sessions

7:00 Social Event

9:00 - 10:30 Perspectives from Smaller Sites

Chairman - Wolfgang von Rueden (CERN)

• D0 Clusters in the Netherlands- Kors Bos (NIKHEF)
• Design and Management of the JLAB Farms - Ian Bird
• Running the multi-platform, multi-experiment cluster at CCIN2P3 - Wojciech Wojcik (CCIN2P3)

10:50 Panel on Software Issues

Tool Selection Criteria, Tool Evaluation, Etc

Chairman: Ian Bird

Panelists:

• Derek Wright (Wisconsin) (Installing, Configuring and Monitoring a Condor Pool)
• Ruth Pordes (FNAL)

Seed Questions:

• How do you select software tools? By reputation, from conference reports, after in-house evaluation, by personal experience, etc. Obviously all of these may play a role - which are the 3 most important in order of significance
• Do you trade-off personnel costs against the cost of acquiring commercial tools?

1:00 - 3:00 Parallel Sessions III

Parallel Session A3 - Monitoring

Chairman: Olof Barring

Panelists:

• Tony Chan (BNL) Talk
• Tanya Levshina Talk (FNAL) (NGOP)
• Olof Barring Talk (CERN) (PEM)

Seed Questions:

• Do you monitor services or servers. In other words, do you monitor that a service is being delivered or that a particular hardware or software status is faulty

Chairwoman: Ruth Pordes

Panelists:

• Mark Kaletka Talk (FNAL)
• Chris Dwan  (Minnesota)

Seed Questions:

• Do you have written policies for users - non-abuse of the system, the right to check e-mail, the right to enforce password rules
• Do you have a dedicated security team?
• Do you permit access from off-site, do you enforce rules for this?

3:30 - 5:30 Parallel Sessions IV

Parallel Session A4 - GRID computing

Chairman - Chuck Boeheim (SLAC)

Panelists:

• Olof Barring Talk (CERN) (European DataGRID, Fabric Mgmt)
• Ruth Pordes (FNAL) (GriPhyN/PPDG) Talk in PDF format --  Talk In PPT Format

Chairman: Tim Smith (CERN)

Panelists:

• David Bigagli (Platform)
• Jeff Tseng (MIT) (Run 2 CDF Level 3 Trigger Online Cluster)
• Tim Smith (CERN) Talk

Seed Questions:

• What kind of applications run on the cluster?
• Does the cluster support both interactive and batch jobs
• Is load balancing automatic or manual?

5:30 End of Day 3 Working Sessions

9:00 - 10:20 Summaries of 8 panels (A1-4, B1-4), 10 mins each

Chairman: Alan Silverman
 

Session A1 Summary (ppt) (HTML)
Session B1 Summary
Session A2 Summary
Session B2 Summary
Session A3 Summary
Session B3 Summary
Session A4 Summary
Session B4 Summary 

10:40 Summary from the 5th Conference on Distributed SuperComputing - Greg Lindahl and Neil Pundit

Chairman - Dane Skow (FNAL)

Last Updated by AGS, 13 Sep, 2001