Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-09-08 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: price, nelhage, quentin, ternus, jesstess, neboat kaduk | jhawk Associate members: lockhart, asedeno, keithw Prospectives: pweaver, xavid, biyeun, jhamrick, tvald | colosimo Guests: sjlevine Officer Reports: kaduk: We've had a lot of events recently, what with the start of term and all. If you want to get reimbursed for something you bought for an event, get me receipts. I have receipts from ... nelhage. nelhage: $100 for A new hard drive for Linerva <8-0-0> nelhage: This Sunday, there will be a Document-A-Thon in the office, with the explicit purpose of documenting all those things that the people in the office know but nobody else does. There will be a wiki set up as a centralized coordination point. kaduk: Yay! ternus: Is there anyone actually taking minutes? asedeno: That was going to be my next question. price: We seem to have a delinquent secretary. Does anyone want to take minutes? [long pause] ternus: OK, fine. [ everyone in the office introduces themselves while the minutes are set up ] jesstess: IAP is, technically, sooner than you think. If you taught last year or want to teach again, please let me know as soon as possible. Freshmen or others: you may be qualified to teach a class! If you're inspired to teach something interesting, talk to me! price: You should teach an IAP class. SIPB Projects Report: quentin: SQL is currently bumping up against the capacity constraints of our hardware. We'd like to upgrade our RAM and switch to faster disks. We are spending almost all of our CPU time on sql.mit.edu in iowait. We have load averages that are unsettling to us. I wonder how the Board would feel about allocating $600 for this purpose. This would be for Western Digital Velociraptors, the fastest hard drives on the market. keithw: Couldn't we just use [XVM's RAID array]? quentin: That would involve a similar expenditure for fibre-channel hardware. The array only allows 2 connected machines and SQL is 2 machines. We can probably hold off for another week or two, but we really need to get this done soon. kaduk: I would like another week for discussion; this is a fair amount of money, and I'm not quite on top of the finances of the SIPB right now. quentin: I plan to make the motion next week. keithw: What about SSDs? pweaver: I did some SSD research. You can't get enough capacity per dollar. keithw: Couldn't we just use RAM? quentin: That was my other thought. I was planning on allocating $600 for hard drives and/or RAM. ternus: I mislike the sound of "and/or". quentin: I'll make a more specific motion next week. price: You should have some discussions during this week. sipb-machine-room@ is good for getting other ideas. At a meeting is not a good time for people to try to understand why you want something unusual. jesstess: You should write for Ask SIPB! Get your name in The Tech and everything! price: For freshmen: we have cluedumps once every week or two starting with aspects of Athena, such as AFS and Kerberos, and going to other computing topics. keithw: Closed timelike curves. price: We have one prospective, y_z, who's organizing cluedumps, but we need somebody else. The last two SIPB chairs to be elected had organized cluedumps; I did this last year. You need to convince speakers to speak, you need to convince people to show up, and you need to buy food -- it's less work for you than for the speakers. It's fun. Talk to me if you're interested. colosimo: XVM is out of memory. price: Once we move to the new hardware, we'll have lots more memory. Office Report: jhawk: The VOIP phones failed catastrophically this weekend. When I started looking for the analog phone cable, it became clear that somebody stole it. Whoever you are, you suck. Please don't do that again. price: LaptopLand is full, as is EuroLaptop and LaptopWorld. ternus: What's the table near the window called? price: TokyoLaptop. ternus: The power cable for TokyoLaptop disappeared. It's probably somewhere in the office. Other: jesstess: 6.828 is the place to be! Mondays and Wednesdays at 12:30! You don't need to be a student, obviously. nelhage: I'm not TAing this year. Don't ask me questions, I might answer them. You should also consider the possibility that there's a finite amount of questions I will answer, and the more you waste on lab 1, the more screwed you'll be later on. Other Other: quentin: PE classes started today. The meeting was adjourned at 19:56. Minutes taken and submitted by ternus.