[Twg] 2010-11-18 meeting minutes

Wed Dec 1 10:03:08 UTC 2010

My apologies for the delay submitting these notes to the group.  (I returned from New Orleans and was caught up in family vacation plans.)  Please send me any corrections or additions that you have.  I will post updated minutes to the website.

A reminder that our next meeting is this Thursday (12/2) at 9:30 PT.  Dial-in numbers are 715-726-4994 or 866-304-8294. The meeting ID and password are 7012090.   Eric will be presenting his roadmap slides:
http://www.opensfs.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Whamcloud-community-development-slides.pdf

I will have a whitepaper outline that we can also review, if there is time.  Let me know if you have any other items you would like added to the agenda.

We never discussed meeting duration.  If we want to restrict ourselves to biweekly meetings, we may want to use 90 minutes.

Feedback is welcome.  Thanks,

--jc
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OpenSFS Technical Working Group
Meeting minutes : 11/18/2010

Location: Broadmoor Room at Ritz Carlton (SC'10)
Time:     3:30-5:00 CT

Attending :
   Name              Organization   email
   ----------------- -------------- ----------------------------
   John Carrier      Cray           carrier at cray.com
   Kit Westeneat     DDN            kwesteneat at ddn.com
   Atul Vidwansa     DDN            avidwansa at ddn.com
   Joshua Walgenbach Indiana Univ.  jjw at indiana.edu
   Marc Stearman     LLNL           marc at llnl.gov
   Chris Moronne     LLNL           morrone2 at llnl.gov
   Frank Indiviglio  NOAA           frank.indiviglio at noaa.gov
   Bryon Neitzel     Oracle         bryon.neitzel at oracle.com
   Sarp Oral         ORNL           oralhs at ornl.gov
   Galen Shipman     ORNL           ghsipman at ornl.gov
   Feyi Wang         ORNL           fwang2 at ornl.gov
   Dave Dillow       ORNL           dillowda at ornl.gov
   Ercan Kamber      RAID, Inc.     ercan_kamber at raidinc.com
   Robert Read       Whamcloud      rread at whamcloud.com
   Eric Barton       Whamcloud      eeb at whamcloud.com

   (Kit and Atul were on the phone)

Agenda : 
   - introductions
   - wg charter and organization
   - whitepaper (due 11/30)
   - schedule for weekly concall

Notes : 

- charter & roadmap 

   Galen introduced the workgroup charter as proposed by the board:
      - gather requirements
      - develop a feature roadmap 
      - generate RFPs 
      - work with contractors to manage deliverables

   The board expects each workgroup to refine its charter through a
   whitepaper to be delivered by the end of the month.  The TWG must
   describe its rules for creating the roadmap and define the
   development model for issuing RFPs, reviewing proposals, and
   evaluating deliverables.

   The first step is developing the roadmap since this will dictate how
   OpenSFS will begin spending its development dollars.  We discussed
   the need for defining a strategy based on short-, medium-, and
   long-term goals.

   The group needs to define the target architecture, not how the
   engineering is done, so that long-term requirements can lead to
   coherent development toward those goals.  Marc suggested quarterly
   review meetings to ensure that we are keeping on track and allow us
   to evaluate our progress and reset priorities if necessary.

   We discussed the importance of defining a mission statement for
   project.  Although exascale is on the horizon, it is important to
   focus on how to make Lustre scale or, in other words, keep up with
   Moore's law.  This implies improving Lustre resiliency as failures
   will be more common at scale and ease administration of the file
   system and hardware as the system grows.  This was summarized as a
   statement to scale, deploy, and maintain Lustre.

   To start the roadmap discussion, Eric has prepared a set of
   slides, which we will review at the next meeting:
   http://www.opensfs.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Whamcloud-community-development-slides.pdf

   We need to look outside OpenSFS and include the community when
   scoping our requirements.  We should look at all the good ideas and
   sort between them.  Then we need to identify the near-term goals
   necessary to move us toward the long-term requirements.

- feature development 

   Assuming we have a roadmap and have identified distinct work projects
   to be completed, we then discussed how we should proceed with
   completing feature development. 

   Efforts of this working group need to be kept open. The community
   should know our roadmap and what features we are pursuing.  We need
   to communicate this work to Oracle so that we can be sure the
   completed features have a place to land without conflict in Oracle's
   canonical Lustre tree.  

   Similarly, we need to canvass the members and community (including
   Oracle) to be sure our development efforts are not duplicating
   development already planned or in progress.

   We then discussed strategies for issuing RFPs. Galen suggested that
   we could initially issue an RFI to determine the cost, which the TWG
   would use to evaluate resource loading. We would then issue RFPs for
   features we could afford.

   We agreed that it would be easier to issue separate smaller RFPs
   rather than one large one.  The RFPs would require that patches be
   made as easily inspectable changes and that sets of patches could be
   easily testable.  

   The RFP should require the contractor to provide the release
   collateral necessary to have the feature accepted into the Oracle
   Lustre tree. This includes design documents, test plans, test
   programs, test inspections, and test results.  

   We discussed the importance of keeping the master stable. The process
   is to patch, test, then land.   With more groups doing development,
   it will be more critical to do more testing.  OpenSFS needs to be
   responsible for gatekeeping of its development branch.

   We then discussed with Bryon how OpenSFS should interface with Oracle
   to land patches.  We agreed that requiring Oracle to do all
   inspections and testing would be onerous.  Instead, we discussed the
   kernel.org model where Linus has trusted lieutenants who can accept
   patches.  Oracle would need to find outside resources who they
   trusted to make these recommendations and to identify an Oracle
   person (eg, Andreas) to accept our landing collateral.

- next meetings

   We are reserving Thursdays at 9:30am PT on our calendars for future
   TWG meetings. The team prefers biweekly meetings. The group wants,
   however, to avoid standing meetings that fill calendars without
   specific goals. The WG chairs will issue a call for agenda items at
   the beginning of the week.  If there are no items to discuss, the
   meeting will be cancelled.  

   Our next meeting is Thursday 12/2.  Call one of these numbers:
   715-726-4994 or 866-304-8294. The meeting ID and password are
   7012090. 

   Agenda for this meeting is 
      - discuss Eric's roadmap slides
      - discuss the whitepaper (John will send an outline Weds PM)

Action Items:

   * Post Eric's roadmap slides to the TWG website: complete

      http://www.opensfs.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Whamcloud-community-development-slides.pdf

   * TWG email reflector should be globally accessible: complete

      All OpenSFS workgroup email archives are available through the
      OpenSFS list interface (http://lists.opensfs.org).  Only TWG
      members, however, can submit email to the reflector. 

      The TWG archive is here:

      http://lists.opensfs.org/pipermail/twg-opensfs.org/

   * Post TWG information to the lustre-community reflector : TBD

      John will post a meeting notice later on 12/1.