Operational Meeting

Minutes of the meeting held on Wednesday 10th June 2020 on-line

Present:: Ross Armstrong, Anila Asif, Richard Bell, Toby Blake, Neil Brown, Chris Cooke, Carol Dow, Nick Dandoulakis, Ian Durkacz, Graham Dutton, Mitchell Hunter, Adam Kirylczuk, Mohammed Javaid, Jennifer Oxley, Iain Rae, Gordon Reid, George Ross, Alastair Scobie, Craig Strachan (Convener and Minutes)

Minutes of the last meeting
The minutes for 3rd June were approved.
Report from Computing Executive Group
- Use of Photographs - May 2020
- On site visit Tue 16th June
Reports from Units
- Infrastructure
  1. JCMB CSR generator test
  2. Forum power
    Iain observed that many of the GPU servers on the affected powerbars are currently in redundent power mode which means that they only draw power from one PSU at a time. The PSU in use swaps randomly. Problems arise when a greater than normal number of operational PSUs are attached to one powerbar. Iain suggested that switching the machines to non-redundant mode would lower the load on individual PDUs at the cost of having the machines reboot if power is lost to a single PSU. It was agreed that this seemed a reasonable compromise. Iain will check with the machines' owners whether this is acceptable.
  3. Externally-visible environment monitoring sites
- Managed Platform
  - nsu on SSH servers
- Research and Teaching
  1. PDU reshuffles
  2. Ubuntu
- Services
  1. Mail server monitoring
  2. New tape library
    Late update - apparently this did arrive on Tuesday 9th.
- User Support
  1. Nothing to report
Topics for discussion
None
Items for the Computing Systems blog
AOCB

Neil mentioned that the current timetable of weekly operational and development meeting was beginning to feel a little overwhelming and that he was feeling pressured to make sure that something had been achieved by the next meeting at the expense of other work. Graham suggested that one solution to this might be to not attend every meeting. Iain noted that restricting meetings to a (short) time period was helpful in not allowing them to cause too much disruption. Neil replied that while this was in general true, of late the shortness of the development meeting seldom allowed all of the agenda to be worked through. Alastair pointed out that we have finished a lot of projects recently and that this was having a temporary impact on the development meeting agenda.
There was general agreement that for the moment we should continue the weekly schedule for both meetings, Chris observing that it gave us a chance to hear each other's voices.
Next meeting
The next meeting will be on Wednesday 17th June 2020 online at 10am.

: Operational : Meetings

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