Minutes of the QUEST-ESM NCAS FAMOUS meeting of Friday, 26th January 2007
Present: Robin, Annette, Ros, Lois, Simon, Jeff, Jonathan
Annette, Robin and Jonathan have overhauled and expanded the FAMOUS wiki website, which is now in place as the external website www.famous.ac.uk, with help from Andy and Katherine. This completes deliverable D1 of the QUEST-ESM contract. Julia thanked us for doing it.
The QUEST cluster is now installed at Bristol. Simon and Annette will ask for usernames. Gethin would like us to try it before the majority of users do. Simon says the PUM 4.5 already there is fine; the only difference from the standard PUM is a modset related to identifying the machine precision. Annette will run a standard FAMOUS job and compare with HPCx results. Once the QUEST cluster is in production, Robin and Jonathan can use it for Quaternary QUEST.
Robin discovered errors in the Mead diagnostics in FAMOUS on HPCx, but not in adtan (Met Office T3E). The bug might be related to other previously identified and fixed ones. Simon may be able to remember something if Robin shows him the details.
Ros, Andy and Lois are considering options for implementing a distributed UMUI. It would be good if all users found a central service hosted in Reading so attractive that they did not want to run the UMUI locally. However, local UMUIs will no doubt continue for the moment. The requirement is somehow to share jobs, not just the basis files, but also the many other files (stashmaster, compile overrides, modsets, ancillaries, start dumps) which are needed for job. This needs to be set up in such a way that ''by default'' users can obtain other user's jobs, without the originator having to have taken special action to put their files in public places. Of course this should only be done within a limited and trusting community that we are supporting, such as QUEST, not with the whole world. For ad-hoc sharing of jobs, documentation is not required; for jobs which we make available as standard, it is important that we know what all the components are and where they came from.