Hi, I thought I'd drop an update to the group on various admin things which have been going on behind the scenes.
The first US meet the devs event was held yesterday, and I'm hoping someone who went will be preparing a blog post to cover the event a little. I know a bunch of people have joined the mailing list since then, so welcome to the group to all of those! ** User Group Engagement with IBM ** I also met with Akhtar yesterday who is the IBM VP for Technical Computing Developments (which includes Spectrum Scale). He was in the UK for a few days at the IBM Manchester Labs, so we managed to squeeze a meeting to talk a bit about the UG. I'm very pleased that Akhtar confirmed IBMs commitment to help the user group in both the UK and USA with developer support for the meet the devs and annual group meetings. I'd like to extend my thanks to those at IBM who are actively supporting the group in so many ways. One idea we have been mulling over is filming the talks at next year's events and then putting those on Youtube for people who can't get there. IBM have given us tentative agreement to do this, subject to a few conditions. Most importantly that the UG and IBM ensure we don't publish customer or IBM items which are NDA/not for general public consumption. I'm hopeful we can get this all approved and if we do, we'll be looking to the community to help us out (anyone got digital camera equipment we might be able to borrow, or some help with editing down afterwards?) Whilst in Manchester I also met with Patrick to talk over the various emails people have sent in about problem determination, which Patrick will be taking to the dev meeting in a few weeks. It sounds like there are some interesting ideas kicking about, so hopefully we'll get some value from the user group input. Some of the new features in 4.2 were also demo'd and for those who might not have been to a meet the devs session and are interested in the upcoming GUI, it is now in public beta, head over to developer works for more details: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/html/topic?id=4dc34bf1- 17d1-4dc0-af72-6dc5a3f93e82&ps=25 ** User Group Feedback ** Over the past few months, I've also been collecting feedback from people, either comments on the mailing list, or those who I've spoken to, which was all collated and sent in to IBM, we'll hopefully be getting some feedback on that in the next few weeks - there's a bunch of preliminary answers now, but a few places we still need a bit of clarification. There's also some longer term discussion going on about GPFS and cloud (in particular to those of us in scientific areas). We'll feed that back as and when we get responses we can share. We'd like to ensure that we gather as much feedback from users so that we can collectively take it to IBM, so please do continue to post comments etc to the mailing list. ** Diary Dates ** A few dates for diaries: * Meet the Devs in Edinburgh - Friday 23rd October 2015 * GPFS UG Meeting @ SC15 in Austin, USA - Sunday 15th November 2015 * GPFS UG Meeting @ Computing Insight UK, Coventry, UK - Tuesday 8th December 2015 (Note you must be registered also for CIUK) * GPFS UG Meeting May 2015 - IBM South Bank, London, UK- 17th/18th May 2016 ** User Group Admin ** Within the committee, we've been talking about how we can extend the reach of the group, so we may be reaching out to a few group members to take this forward. Of course if anyone has suggestions on how we can ensure we reach as many people as possible, please let me know, either via the mailing list of directly by email. I know there are lot of people on the mailing list who don't post (regularly), so I'd be interested to hear if you find the group mailing list discussion useful, if you feel there are barriers to asking questions, or what you'd like to see coming out of the user group - please feel free to email me directly if you'd like to comment on any of this! We've also registered spectrumscale.org to point to the user group, so you may start to see the group marketed as the Spectrum Scale User Group, but rest assured, its still the same old GPFS User Group ;-) Just a reminder that we made the mailing list so that only members can post. This was to reduce the amount of spam coming in and being held for moderation (and a few legit posts got lost this way). If you do want to post, but not receive the emails, you can set this as an option in the mailing list software. Finally, I've also fixed the mailing list archives, so these are now available at: http://www.gpfsug.org/pipermail/gpfsug-discuss/ Simon GPFS UG, UK Chair _______________________________________________ gpfsug-discuss mailing list gpfsug-discuss at gpfsug.org http://gpfsug.org/mailman/listinfo/gpfsug-discuss
