Traveling and training!

Phew it's been a busy week! Arrived in Wisconsin Sunday afternoon for my first week of training as a Cray engineer. I've worked in HPC for three years now, and I can honestly say that this is an entirely different level! There are a lot of things that we did similarly at Purdue, but there are a ton of differences simply in the way the parts of the machine interact.

There's also a huge difference in the amount of system knowledge you're required to have. At Purdue, we could get away with not knowing the little things about the system. Nodes booted just like a normal Linux box, and all was happy. We had storage admins to take care of our storage, and network engineers to deal with our network issues. Problems with the batch scheduler? You just IM one of our PBS admins. Everyone had their own little job (not to underestimate their abilities), and they stuck to it. When you weren't doing that job, you had side projects.

However, that was a site with 15 admins + people from other groups at your disposal. I'll be one of two engineers on site for my system. That's a big difference! There is no storage engineer there to configure your disks. You don't get a network engineer to figure out why something won't ping.

Don't get me wrong, there's still an entire engineering staff back at HQ at your disposal, it's just they aren't going to do it for you. You have to know the details about everything, or else you'll just spend the entire time on the phone asking how to turn the darn thing on!

Cray has enough people that come into town for their training classes and test phases that they have their own 3-bedroom apartment/condo available for some of the employees. This place is great! You don't have to deal with a hotel, or driving long distances - it's literally just around the corner from the office, close enough you could walk in about 20 minutes if the weather's nice.

The most stressful thing about this week though? Not being able to play. I miss my piano. I miss my sax. Jen Wiley posted another set of recordings from Tuesday night's Jazz Party at the Knickerbocker, and they sound amazing! I really wish I could've been there. Maybe I'll find some time Sunday when I'm home for a few hours that I can play before I head down to Mississippi. Until then, I'll just have to be content with listening.