[Lustre-community] SC10 HPCFS Community Technical Meeting Agenda

[Peter Bojanic]

Hi folks,

We have a ballroom that will comfortably seat 100 people for our first face-to-face community meeting at SC10 at 6-8PM on Sunday, November 14th. This kind of resource is very hard to come by so many kind thanks to Intel for the generous contribution.

A few ideas were kicked around on the HPCFS call today and we all agreed that the session should be technically focused. I'll outline my interpretation of proposed topics in a draft agenda, below, to get the creative juices flowing.

0. Meeting kick-off (10 minutes)
- welcome everyone to the session; review agenda
- really no time to do introductions of 100 people; any thoughts on this?
- review: HPCFS booth; other meetings this week; future events; update on LUG 2011

1. Feature Development Projects (45 minutes)
- have community members -- vendors and users alike -- deliver short "lightning talks" on their Lustre feature development and testing projects; this will give us a broad perspective of who is working on what
- for development projects, answer a set of standard questions as much as you're willing or able to: base Lustre version; estimated resources and duration; anticipated completion date; where to find out more
- for testing projects, answer standard questions: test cluster characteristics; routine availability (e.g. available for 4-hour test shot once a week); special availability (e.g. available for an entire week, twice a year); test suite summary
- time budget: ~5 minutes each; larger organizations (e.g. Oracle) may take 7-10 minutes
- we'll poll organizations in advance to determine who is going to present and fine-tune the line-up
- to make this go smoothly, we'll need folks to submit PDF material in advance and have it pre-loaded on a projection system

2. Community Collaboration Discussion Panel (60 minutes)
- conduct a panel discussion with leading community engineering leaders where some substantial amount of Lustre development is happening
- participants should include: Jacques-Charles Lafoucriere (CEA), Brian Behlendorf (LLNL), Andreas Dilger (Oracle), Eric Barton (WhamCloud), Peter Braam or Chris Bloxham (Xyratex); others are welcome
- format can be a series of questions to the panel; they can have prepared slides to address (submitted in advance) or just talk

Candiate questions (10 minutes each topic plus 5 minutes general discussion):
- what are the anticipated challenges and opportunities (2 questions) associated with the rapidly evolving Lustre development community
- how can we coordinate bug fixing and feature development into a common set of branches for testing and evaluation?
- how can we collaborate with Oracle to ensure that changes (bug fixes and features) get included upstream into the canonical release branches?
- what common practices, processes, and standards are required to ensure compatibility and the highest standards of quality for Lustre?

3. Meeting wrap-up and next actions (5 minutes)
- summarize key next actions

There was also some discussion about a Lustre feature requirements gathering exercise. In my experience, such an effort could easily take 2-4 hours with an audience as large as this and probably can't be managed effectively with our limited time. My suggestion is to focus on some of the community collaboration basics, above, and defer this matter to a later meeting (LUG, perhaps).

Some questions to help generate discussion:
- how closely does this match your expectations?
- who are the "must have" organizations/people to which we should reach out?
- is there anything really important that appears to be missing?
- is the proposed format practical and workable?

I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Cheers,
Bojanic=
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