On January 29th, 2016 the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab High Performance Computing Services team hosted Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) program staff and Stanford Research Computing team members for a day of briefings, discussion, and bridge-building across the three institutions’ research IT support programs.
The day kicked off with introductions and overviews presented by managers Ruth Marinshaw (Stanford Research Computing), Gary Jung (LBNL HPCS and BRC-High Performance Computing), and Patrick Schmitz (Research IT - BRC). The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s Brent Draney, Networking and Security group lead, then led the teams on a tour of the state-of-the-art data center at the newly-opened Shyh Wang Hall.
Following the tour and a working lunch, Berkeley, Stanford, and LBNL staff formed breakout groups to discuss the following topics:
- Faculty onboarding
- Virtualization with X Windows
- Storage and research data management
- Expertise networks (ACI-REF, etc.)
At the breakout sessions, the teams described their experience supporting researchers at their respective institutions and exchanged ideas. Reconvening, participants summarized similarities and differences between their groups’ work, and identified ideas that emerged as candidates for implementation at one or multiple schools. Colleagues committed to continue collaborating remotely, and the teams expressed interest in follow-up, as well as another cross-institution exchange in 6-12 months.
The CORI supercomputer cluster, above, is the newest in the NERSC data center