Previous administration meeting

Wednesday 9th November

Agenda

• Timing of these administration meetings
• Career development plans and the technology (Alex)
• Upcoming conferences
• New wiki-pages
• Coffee machine
• Misc

People who will be absent

N/A

Results

• Administration meetings have been moved to Thursdays 10h30
• Online career development plans: Alex is going to present the technology next meeting
• New Wiki pages:
  • Robotics and AI conferences, journals and impact factors
• Coffee machine: Marco is going to check prices at Illy and next meeting we are going to vote on which machine to buy

Thursday 17th November

Agenda

• Alex : make the wiki faster : how ? software / hardware solutions ?
• Alex : security is never perfect... do we have a daily backup of the database (ie all wiki contents) ?
• Marco Dorigo (MD): I would like to discuss the "duration" of MEETOPT and MEETROBOTS meetings.

It seems to me that we should set a firm limit to the talk and discussion parts. May be 30 min each?

• MD: Time change for MEETADMIN of Dec 8, 2005
• MD: People should identify themselves when producing items in this list
• Usage policy for HD space on the rack/cluster
• Online career development plan
• Coffee machine: This time we will choose which one to buy
• IRIDIA Christmas dinner
• IRIDIA lab webpage - It is not reall necessary to discuss this point as it is already in the works since long (but before we work on it we need to have the database ready and filled, which will take a few weeks more) and it will be finalised sooner or later!
• New conferences
• New Wiki pages
• Misc

People who will be absent

N/A

Results

• Faster Wiki: We are in the process of buying new hardware, that should solve the problem.
• 'Wiki Security: Security and network infrastructure is changing, backups, security, etc. are getting reviewed and reimplemented.
• 'Duration of weekly meetings: 30 mins for presentation, 30 mins for discussion MAXIMUM. Will be enforced.
• Schedule change: 8th of Dec. the admin meeting will begin at 10h00 instead of 10h30, due to a clash with a lecture.
• Rack HD space policy: If the free disk space becomes less than a certain threshhold, a mail is sent to all containing statistics on who is (ab)using all the space. A mail is sent monthly to everyone listing who is using how much. In case this does not work quotes will be implemented.
  • Max: I have implemented two cron jobs on majorana: the first check every hour if the available space is less than 30% and in case send an email to all_AT_iridia, the second is the monthly report on the status of the used space sent by email to all_AT_iridia.
• On line career development plan: Go to the StudentsIRIDIA page and fill out your career development plan. Currently, the pages are public, but soon this should change (Alex + Anders).
• Coffee machine: We are going to buy an Illy Classic - lab pays 500 EUR the students pay 20 EUR each (Christos is responsible).
• Lab webpage: Currently work is being done on it - DB should be ready around New Years and then content has to be filled in.
• New Conferences:
  • See Robotics and AI conferences, journals and impact factors
• New Wiki Pages:
  • StudentsIRIDIA

Thursday 24th November

Agenda

• New Wiki Pages
• New Conferences
• Rodi: Memory Extension for the Rack and Marco: New rack's memory?
• Anders: Business cards
• Marco: changes in IRIDIA logical positioning within ULB
• Alex : database problems. I asked some info to Halva on backup, but at the moment everything is fuzzy.
• Alex : I think it would be nice to setup a wiki page with all the seminars held in Brussels. I am sure we miss many nice opportunities.
• Misc
  • Paola's and Christos' dinner and party
  • Christos: Coffee machine payment
• Anders: How to use the new coffee machine

Results

• New Wiki Pages:
  • Pizza
  • Seminars
• New Conferences: None.
• Rodi: Memory Extension for the Rack and Marco: New rack's memory?
  • Try to upgrade one node and if it works, upgrade the rest.
• Anders: Business cards
  • MD is going to check prices.
• Marco: changes in IRIDIA logical positioning within ULB
  • Reorganization within the ULB might result in IRIDIA being merged with two other labs. More will be known in January.
• Alex : database problems
  • Alex is trying to repair the DB.
• Wiki page on all the seminars held in Brussels:
  • Please update the page when you hear about seminars, or add links to pages with seminars to the Seminars Wiki-page.

Thursday 15th December

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
• New conferences
• Christos: There is 40 EUR left from the coffee machine contribution, let's discuss how to spend this money, one idea is we buy some common lab coffee which we can all use, or even to buy a couple of cakes would not be a bad idea. Lets discuss this cause in there there's ~1.9 e from everybody!
• Max: Issues with NFS on the IRIDIA Cluster.
  • The solution adopted by Prasanna for his experiments relieves some "stress" from the harddrive (bottleneck for NFS).
• Max: Memory for the nodes of IRIDIA Cluster.
  • I have installed on r17 4*512MB and on r04 8*256MB. Some quick test seems to show some small difference in performance.
• Rodi: Policy for IRIDIA Tech Report
• Marco/Mauro: Backup databases
• Anders: Coffee machine and decalcification?

Results

• New Wiki pages:
  • Updated LaTeX package for technical reports - can be downloaded from IRIDIA Technical reports.
• New Conferences
  • "IEEE 2006 Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems" added to Robotics and AI conferences, journals and impact factors
• Cluster and NFS: Frequent reads/writing on the NFS on the cluster is slow. Use /tmp (local on each node) if you want to use intermediate files. Can give a x3 speed-up. A Wiki page should be made on these type of programming-for-the-cluster-tricks (Max).
• Cluster and RAM: Max and Rodi are currently testing different memory configurations for the cluster.
• IRIDIA technical reports and dates: The date of the technical report is the day on which you get the technical report number from Muriel. This should prevent situations where a technical report from e.g. 2004 references publications from 2005.
• Database backup: The DB backup should be done using mysqldump and not by copying files. Alex is responsible.
• Coffee machine: Tom is responsible for hunting down the coffee machine manual and the decalcify the machine.
• New permanent point for the weekly admin meetings: Rodi suggested to add a new default item to the agendas for the admin meetings, namely "Announcements and Publications". The idea is that if anyone is about to publish something or have published something then they briefly tell everyonbe else about it. Rodi's creative suggestion was accepted without much bloodshed.

Thursday 12th January

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications
• Anders: Cluster queues and nice levels on the cluster - it seems like they need to be balanced if the "long" jobs are supposed to ever finish.
• Max: Cluster maintenance - I need to shut down the cluster for 1 day in order to performe some maintenance tasks (we received the new RAM and the new power cord)

Results

• New Wiki pages
  • IRIDIA Technical reports
• New conferences: None
• Announcements and Publications: Rodi, Tom, Francisco and Anders had new publications.
• Anders: Cluster queues and nice levels on the cluster
  • The cluster queues will be adjusted.
• Max: Cluster maintenance
  • Don't submit any jobs to the cluster before the maintenance has been performed. An estimate for the time need for the jobs currenty in the queue is needed by the submitters. Max will let everyone know when the cluster maintenance is going to take place once he knows.
  • Status on Jan 13 - Prasanna's job should finish in 2-3 days; Tom has not communicate me still a forcast

Thursday 19th January

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications
• Max: Cluster and queueing system: In order to avoid that a node is chocked by too many concurrent jobs (this was happening when nodes were using heavily the swap space), we need to tune the number of slots per queue.

Results

• New Wiki pages
  • Max: For Apple computer owners
  • Max: Programming tips for the cluster
  • Max: IRIDIA Wi-Fi network
• New conferences: None
• Announcements and Publications: None
• Cluster and queueing system
  • 1GB of memory has been added to each node of the cluster. Now each node has 2GB or RAM, 4.5GB of swap space, and 20GB of /tmp space for local data storage. Nodes from r02 to r17 have 4x512MB DDR ECC REG DIMM, while nodes from r18 to r33 have 8*256MB DDR ECC REG DIMM.
  • The queues have been reniced like this: short=nice 2, medium=nice 3, long=nice 3, par=nice 2
  • The slots for queues have been changed like this: 3 slots in the short queue, 2 slots in the medium queue, 1 slot in the long queue and 1 slot in the parallel queue. We now have maximum 7 concurrent jobs per node (with an average space in RAM of 290MB per process) and 224 maximal concurrent jobs in the whole system.

Thursday 26th January

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications
• Anders: Electronic journal access
• Anders: Business cards

Results

• New Wiki pages
  • Cloning a Debian server
  • Thomas and Alex are going to reorganize the Wiki because the frontpage is cluttering up
• New conferences
  • 2006 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference - deadline 1st Feb!! (see Robotics and AI conferences, journals and impact factors)
• Announcements and Publications
  • Ciro is getting married
• Electronic journal access
  • Through Muriel's computer
• Business cards
  • Marco is going to put an item on the agenda once the money for business cards has been found.

Thursday 2nd February

Agenda

• New Wiki pages

Alex : a page about libsboteye Alex : Rehan announced a HOWTO about assembling/disassembling a sbot

• Marco: Coming paper submissions page
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications
• Marco: We should add a wikipage with planned paper submission, deadlines for submission, and info on CPU usage requirements.
• Marco: New digital projector.
• Marco: When will the new server be operational?
• Marco: IRIDIA backup to be put in another building?
• Alex : More space for backup ?
• Alex : Raid5 backup would make me feel safier.

People that will be absent:

Rodi, Alex?

Results

• New Wiki pages
  • Libsboteye
  • SBot Disassembly and Reassembly HOWTO
  • Coming paper submissions - if you are going to publish something, but down the conference and you name on this page.
• New conferences: None
• Announcements and Publications: None
• When will the new server be operational?
  • Not tomorrow but within 1-2 months.
• IRIDIA backup to be put in another building?:
  • MD will check with the staff at the other location. Also it should be checked if there is enough bandwidth to run a backup server from that location.
• Other:
  • This wiki is slow. We are going to buy some more RAM for the current IRIDIA server.

Thursday 9th February

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications
• Max: nobody seems to use the page Coming paper submissions.

People who will be absent

Anders

Thursday 20th April 2006

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications

• MARCO: Discuss creation of new web page with list of web pages cited in our papers and tech reps.
• Christos: Discuss who can use the cluster (for example people that left, like Paola or Tom or Vicentini, and the space they use)
• Shervin: Discuss a slight optimization of the cluster-policy.
• Anders: The IRIDIA server - services, backups and transfer of data to the new installation

People who will be absent

Results

• New web page
  • Marco D and Christos ND will take care of creating a new web or wiki page.
• Who can use the cluster
  • Only people directly associated with IRIDIA (students, post docs, etc.) can use the cluster. Researchers who left should arrange with their contact/collaborator/supervisor here, to use his/her login in case they need to use the cluster.
• The cluster-policy
  • Max explained the cluster policy and a mem limit might be introduced.
• The IRIDIA server
  • Anders is going to send a mail with the list of packages on the new IRIDIA server and the pacakges configured. People, who are responsible for things running on the IRIDIA server, should make sure that data related to whatever they are in charge of, is correctly backed up.

Thursday 4th May 2006

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications
• Arrangement of the coffee room
• MD: Presentation/discussion of the lab responsibilities list
• MD: Participation to the Contact Day of the CIL (Computational Intelligence and Learning) doctoral school
• Max: nobody seems to use the page Coming paper submissions

People who will be absent

• Marco Montes de Oca

Results

• New Wiki pages
  • Max: Submission tips for the cluster
• New conferences
  • CIL conference, one paper from the optimization group and one from the robotics nerds should be submitted. Dealline: Beginning of June.
• Announcements and Publications
  • Elio and Christos had a paper accepted for SAB06
  • Anders had a paper accepted for SAB06
• Arrangement of the coffee room
  • Thomas, Mauro, Carlotta, Elio, Shervin, and Francisco C. Santos are meeting Friday at 14h00 to discuss different options. Their results will be presented at the next admin meeting
• MD: Presentation/discussion of the lab responsibilities list
  • If you want to discuss the assignment of your responsibilities, talk to Marco D.
  • If you want to add more tasks, talk to Marco D.
• MD: Participation to the Contact Day of the CIL (Computational Intelligence and Learning) doctoral school
  • See under New conferences above
• Max: nobody seems to use the page Coming paper submissions
  • And nobody will in the future.
• ADDITIONAL POINT
  • Remember to inform Christos of any URLs referenced in your papers!

Thursday 18th May 2006

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
  • Insurance while travelling abroad - ULB's insurance
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications
• Max: IRIDIA mailing lists (Staff, Guests, PhD Students, Optimization Group, Twodee) moved to GNU/Mailman
  • https://iridia.ulb.ac.be/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/
• Marco: BNAIC: who is submitting/presenting? FNRS Comp Int day: who is submitting/presenting?
• Marco: Three new master students will join IRIDIA. Decide on supervisors.
• Christos: I will present the structure and explain how we will be using the IRIDIA SUPPLEMENTARY PAGE, plus I will refer to the things that each one should provide and things that people should do with respect to cited pages in papers, so please do not be absent! :)
  • http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/supp

People who will be absent

Thursday 25th May 2006

Agenda

• New Wiki pages
• New conferences
• Announcements and Publications

• Alex : about robotics meetings, people are slowly taking the habit to not provide any material, even after the presentation. I think it is important to always provide the presentation. This is helps to really keep track of what has been said, what people do and so on. + it costs almost nothing ...

People who will be absent