[Openbenchmark] Discussion on Improving Participation at F2F meeting

[Tiwari, Devesh]

All,

We had discussed this issue in one of meetings following LUG, and we dived deep into this issue today again. It was well worth it.

Before we discuss this particular issue and ask for your feedback, let me very strongly comment upon the progress we have made since the SC meeting. We have added a lot of new content on the wiki and improved the quality of already existing content. A lot of progress has been made for hero run task and application I/O kernel extraction. I, personally, would like to commend you all for the contributions you have made. Given that BWG activity is not your primary job responsibility in many cases, it only further emphasizes the commitment and engagement you have shown. So, thank you!

However, as with any process, the opportunity for improvement never ceases to exist. While we do make progress on bi-weekly calls, the F2F meeting participation at LUG didn't reflect it well.

First, we are attempting to identifying the possible causes for low participation.

1. BWG task is not central to our day-time job. Hence, harder to justify for travel approvals.
2. Even if it's central to the day time job, it remains harder to justify travel because it's such a small activity (2 hours of in-person meeting).

Please speak freely about the other possible reasons you can think of. This is not an attempt to point fingers at anyone's absence. In fact, we are equally worried about why LUG participants didn't pour into our BWG that evening and what could be done to improve upon that.

Both these reasons are pretty fundamental ones and not specific to LUG. So, some of us speculate that the same may happen at SC F2F meeting, unless we get together and plan better.

We discussed many ways to improve upon the situation. I am just listing the primary ones here, please add more. We really need your input here.

1. Organize BoF at SC and attract non OpenSFS members to the meeting. BWG members may still find it difficult to attend it since most organizations cap the number of SC attendees. But, if we all put something together, our chances of getting approval increases.

2. One day workshop (with a few referred paper) purely dedicated to performance benchmarking. Multiple issues: funding, logistics overhead, yet another workshop. Could we learn from LustreEcoSystem workshop?
http://lustre.ornl.gov/ecosystem/

3. Tag along with other SC workshops such as PDSW. Become their sponsors and attract a wider audience. Still requires SC travel approval, but no stand alone strong justification (unlike #1).

4. Reduce the frequency of F2F meeting to one per year and be flexible in terms where it should be co-located.

5. Irrespective of everything, we need to publicize our group and work better.

Please throw in more ideas and comment on the value of existing ones.

Thanks,

Andrew and ∂t

…∂t

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensfs.org/pipermail/openbenchmark_lists.opensfs.org/attachments/20150515/7d090982/attachment.html>