Several sysadmins met today at UWC for the first HPC forum meeting. Represented were UWC, UCT, CHPC, SANBI and the University of Stellenbosch. There was discussion on common schedulers, file systems and supporting technologies. Also several topics for further investigation were raised; the (difficult) task of getting computer science departments interested in HPC and infrastructure as research topics, the difficulty of doing research on technology while running live systems and the need to guide the development of future HPC admins (drawing e.g. on university students).
Many thanks to Peter van Heusden at SANBI for hosting the meeting. We're hoping to have a breakaway session at the upcoming CHPC conference in Cape Town in December.
All Southern African HPC sysadmins are welcome to email Peter to be added to the mailing list.