Feedback from the Infiniband Foundations Course at CSCS
CSCS and hpc-ch organized together with Mellanox Training Center a two day introduction course to Infiniband for Sysadmins.
25 sysadmins from different Swiss universities and industry participated to the course. We asked some of the participants about their impressions.
Michael Rolli, University of Bern:
“[The course was] very fruitful actually. I learned a lot of the concepts behind Infiniband, the available products and how they fit to each other. I am now able to assess our current setup and identify problems. Additionally, the main knowledge gain is that I’m now able to plan into the future after having seen the possibilities and some of the pitfalls. Concluding – the two days where exactly what I needed by now and I’m looking forward to a possible follow up course next year.
And another point to emphasize: I have met lots of other colleagues throughout Switzerland personally and a contact person at Mellanox.”
Jacquot Martin, Universtiy of Basel
“This was a very good initiative. We have an Infiniband network interface on almost all our nodes and the course helped me to get a better overview of this technology. The knowledge will also be useful in the daily business and in the future, to plan the upgrade or the extension of the cluster. I am also interested in other technologies and I will participate to other courses if the topic is useful for my site.”
Sergio Maffioletti, University of Zurich
“A very interesting and very intense 2-days course on Infiniband. With a Mellanox expert that presented the technology and the key operation concepts, the course was very usefull for us in helping streamline the operation of our current IB deployment.”
Gianfranco Sciacca, University of Bern:
“At LHEP, UniBE we have just started a migration to the Infiniband technology in the local network in order to be able to support parallel applications, for which there is an increasing demand among our user base. Since it is a new technology for us, I have been looking forward to a good introductory training. The one offered by CSCS together with Mellanox proved to be extremely useful. I have found the content very well balanced between basic and more advanced topics. As a beginner as an Infniband administrator, there could have been no better introduction for me, I have surely profited a lot from attending it. I will look forward to a sequel next year, as my level of knowledge will hopefully be adequate to follow the more advanced training that will likely be offered.”