September 11, 2025 Minutes
The meeting focused on preparing for the Supercomputing Conference (SC) Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on Operational Data Analytics (ODA). Jeff Hanson co-ran the meeting for Michael. The BoF’s main theme is sharing data, with the goal of connecting groups that need data and have expertise with those that have data but face challenges distributing it. The abstract emphasizes making more operational data available to stakeholders while maintaining safety, privacy, and legal compliance. Key topics identified for the session include democratized access to data (such as the LLView tool from JSC), challenges in data formatting and protocol translation (for example, Modbus to time-series databases), making raw and engineered data public, and the difficulties of collaboration across internal and external teams. The session will run for one hour, including short presentations, a panel discussion, and Q&A, and organizers agreed to diversify presenters beyond the usual participants.
On potential presenters and participants, Filipe Guimaraes (JSC) will not attend SC, but Wolfgang Frings, the creator of LLView, is expected to attend and may present. Melissa Romanus will send the long BoF description to Filipe and Wolfgang to facilitate participation. Jeff Hanson will reach out to Terry Jones (ExaDIGIT) to discuss challenges faced by data consumers, and Woong Shin will follow up with Terry as well. Melissa Romanus will ask Raph from Sustainable Berkeley Lab to present on methods for sharing facility data, including topics such as carbon usage and converting Modbus data into time-series formats. Michael is involved in European data-sharing initiatives, and Filipe mentioned the Synergies project, which focuses on unifying monitoring tools.
Natalie Bates suggested contacting Mike Mason, Steve Senator, or David DeBonis at Los Alamos National Lab regarding their ODA and collaborative data tool work, and Woong Shin and Natalie will follow up with these contacts to encourage participation and diversify the panel. David Gaines will check with colleagues at NREL about presenting their work on the Slurm simulator or energy-aware scheduling and will get back to the organizers by late this week or early next week. Woong Shin suggested inviting someone from the IBM Blue Water team to discuss their experience publishing a large public data set, and Jeff Hanson will confirm whether his contacts from that project are still available. All BoF organizers will continue to accept inquiries and proposals from colleagues who wish to present as part of the series, an effort that will help increase community visibility and knowledge sharing.
On SC submission and scheduling, the next submission stage, which includes program materials and any speaker updates, is due by midnight, September 29. Natalie’s panel, Large Scale and High Density AI and HPC: Sustainability Challenges, is scheduled for Tuesday, 1:30 to 3:00 PM. The EE HPC WG has three accepted BoFs (ODA, Green500, and Liquid Cooling Systems). To prevent scheduling conflicts, Tim Osborne will contact Linklings to add Natalie to the ODA BoF correspondence. The EE HPC Working Group will have a booth at SC, and Natalie encouraged teams, including the ODA group, to take time at the booth. The group also plans to organize an informal gathering during the conference.
Several workshops were identified as relevant to the ODA community, including the Digital Twin Workshop (half-day), the X HET AIs Workshop (title to be confirmed, with Jeff Hanson to find the full name), and the Sustainable Supercomputing Workshop, which includes papers from Woong Shin. Looking ahead to future ODA community activities, the group plans to launch a brown bag presentation series (name may change) to create opportunities for members to share their ODA experiences, plans, and technical stacks. Paul Brunk volunteered to test technical stacks and share results from an operator’s perspective.
Attendees included Natalie Bates (EE HPC WG), Melissa Romanus (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), Jeff Hanson (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), Brandon Biggs (Idaho National Lab), Rachel Palumbo (Oak Ridge National Lab), Filipe Guimaraes (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), Paul Brunk (University of Georgia), Ian Hoffman (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), Kathleen Shoga (Lawrence Livermore National Lab), Tim Osborne (Oak Ridge National Lab), David Gaines (National Renewable Energy Lab), Woong Shin (ORNL), and Hervé Mathieu (Denergium).
