Word from User Support

Fall is almost over and winter is soon upon us. Since the inaugural issue of our user newsletter, SDSC Thread, many of the SDSC staff have been preparing for the annual SC|05 meeting . This meeting was held November 14-18, 2005; and it showcased the latest developments from vendors and researchers in supercomputing. SDSC's booth showed off a number of the research projects from our users that utilize SDSC resources. In particular we showcased data intensive applications including the Terashake Project and the Colloboration Notebook project that uniquely benefit from the SDSC's data-optimized high-end computing environment.

In addition to the recent DataStar upgrade to 15.6 Tflops, we continue to enhance our data offerings (GPFS expansion to 115TB, deployement of .2 PB GPFS-WAN filesystem, data allocations via datacentral.sdsc.edu ). If you have particular challenges in managing large data collections, manipulating large datasets or wish to share a data collection, the SDSC consulting staff would like to hear from you so that we might assist you. This issue of Thread introduces three new features

• A search option
• Access to archived issues of newsletter
• A crossword puzzle that will alternate with the trivia section

On behalf of the SDSC User Services staff and myself, we hope you enjoy the newsletter. Expanded information on all User Services programs can be found at http://www.sdsc.edu/us

Best Regards,
Anke Kamrath

Anke Kamrath is reachable via e-mail at kamratha@sdsc.edu