Besides leadership, we should ask "why" MPI Next "now" vs "later" vs. "ever." According to Robert's Rules of Order, a motion to adjourn is always in order. Why are we assuming that MPI goes on as before, with multiyear planning? We should first entertain, second, and either accept or defeat a motion to adjourn, and those voting against adjourning should provide rationale for continuing "now." A second vote could be to "wait X months/years" and then automatically return. For instance, why not give the OpenMPI and MPICH development teams a chance to finish their work, distribute releases, write up findings, discover errata, tune, let people get trained, let applications be ported and use those new features, achieve buy-in and acceptance, and have actual users give feedback, so we come tothe "Next" with the experience of results? In the meantime, research on the areas that are still controversial could continue without the need to "be standardized" at the same time as they are being figured out. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rolf Rabenseifner" <[email protected]> To: "Main MPI Forum mailing list" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2012 5:17:15 AM Subject: Re: [Mpi-forum] MPI Next leadership As MPI-2.1 chair, I must clearly say that I could not have been the MPI-2.1 chair if there would not have been Rich as the convener of the meetings. And I'm thankful that Rich has done it the whole time together with the local organizers, mainly Jeff, the team of Microsoft and all European organizers at the EuroMPI conferences. As far as I understand, Rich would continue to be our convener. About MPI-next chair: Although the chair should clearly be neutral, I would prefer to have a MPI-next chair from a public research institution. Of course he/she must have the support from her/his institution to travel to the meetings. I see also that he/she need not only to focus on the new topics, but also on the quality of the standard, i.e., after the time and content is right, to organizing also the finalization of such an new version of MPI. Rolf ----- Original Message -----
From: "Rajeev Thakur" <[email protected]> To: "Main MPI Forum mailing list" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2012 10:51:45 AM Subject: Re: [Mpi-forum] MPI Next leadership It has also been suggested that the Forum take a break for a bit before resuming again, but I don't know if that was discussed at the last meeting.
Rajeev
On Sep 27, 2012, at 1:09 AM, Schulz, Martin wrote:
On Sep 26, 2012, at 9:46 PM, Bronis R. de Supinski wrote:
Jeff:
My intent is not to "neuter" the chair. Instead, I am only stating that the chair should clearly state when (s)he is voicing personal/institutional opinions as opposed to acting as leader (sometimes the roles conflict and also sometimes the leader does have to enforce the clear general opinion).
I think you are saying the same thing. This is, of course, aside the fact that you wouldn't find anybody who is active in the forum and who doesn't have a personal agenda. We all have one and that's why we are engaged. The people with a double role just have to keep it separate - and that's not only true for the chair, but (perhaps to a lesser extent) also for the other roles that Jeff pointed out.
I also agree with Jeff - if we are setting up a new structure, let's look at all roles and define them better.
As to logistics, yes, I see your point but I still think that combining them would generally simplify things. I also think it is fine for the chair to delegate aspects that the convener handles but they should still be responsible for them (we all blame the chair if they do not go right so they should also have the authority since they de facto have responsibility).
The convener role will always have to be split up, in particular if meetings get hosted at individual organizations. A certain part of the work (e.g., wireless, badging, room reservation, ...) always fell on people from the hosting organization and that won't change.
The more critical question, IMHO, is the financial part that Jeff brought up. We have organizations that have more restrictions than others and we have to take that into account. Further, if the person responsible for financial transactions changes, we have to transfer money - the same if the person responsible changes organization (as we can see at Rich's example, which ended up being non trivial or even impossible, if I understood the situation right). The easiest thing would be to have a constant entity who manages all financial aspects of the forum along with a separate role of a treasurer.
Martin
Bronis
On Wed, 26 Sep 2012, Jeff Squyres wrote:
This is exactly why we should have the discussion: "chair" and "convener" have not necessarily been the same person over the last few years. Rich has been the convener since 2.1, but has only been the chair for 3.0.
My $0.02 is that I don't think they need to be the same person. The chair is the [neutral] technical leader (and therefore sets the meeting agendas), but the convener is someone with an organization who can make meeting room reservations, accept registration and payments from meeting attendees, etc. That being said, as long as the chair remains neutral in setting the agenda and guiding the process, the chair should be allowed to have their own technical opinions, just like anyone else. Otherwise, you're just neutering the chair, and their incentive to participate is quite limited.
In short: I see the convener as a largely logistical role, but the chair as more of a technical role.
On Sep 27, 2012, at 6:33 AM, Bronis R. de Supinski wrote:
Personally, I think "chair" should also be "meeting convener". The chair should be largely administrative/neutral/meeting organizer and runner. Convening meetings is a natural part of that activity. The chair should not be promoting a particular technical agenda (at least not as "chair").
On Wed, 26 Sep 2012, Jeff Squyres wrote:
As part of this discussion, it might be worthwhile to also bring up the auxiliary roles -- there's a bunch of things that happen behind the scenes to make the Forum function:
- secretary - meeting convener - web maintainers (main site, meetings site, lists site) - svn / trac maintainer
I mention this because, although I'm happy to continue in the role as secretary, a) if there's someone else burning to do that role, it would be fair to discuss it, and b) sometimes there has been confusion about exactly what the secretary is supposed to do. Maybe it would be useful to delineate the responsibilities of the auxiliary roles. Just like we discovered that we all didn't have the same conceptions of how the secretary applies the voting rules, perhaps there are other unwritten inconsistencies, too.
On Sep 26, 2012, at 10:27 PM, Brightwell, Ronald wrote:
Greetings:
I wasn't able to attend the Forum meeting last week, so I don't know if this came up or not, but given that it's election season in the US and MPI 3.0 has been officially accepted, it seems like a good time to discuss leadership of the Forum going forward. I know several people who have been involved from a leadership standpoint are in different situations now then they were when the 3.0 process started, and their priorities and commitments are different. I think it might be good to have an open discussion about making changes to some of the leadership roles in an effort to make sure that we start this next phase in the best way possible.
-Ron
_______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum
-- Jeff Squyres [email protected] For corporate legal information go to: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/
_______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum
_______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum
-- Jeff Squyres [email protected] For corporate legal information go to: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/
_______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum
________________________________________________________________________ Martin Schulz, [email protected], http://people.llnl.gov/schulzm CASC @ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, USA
_______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum
_______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum
-- Dr. Rolf Rabenseifner . . . . . . . . . .. email [email protected] High Performance Computing Center (HLRS) . phone ++49(0)711/685-65530 University of Stuttgart . . . . . . . . .. fax ++49(0)711 / 685-65832 Head of Dpmt Parallel Computing . . . www.hlrs.de/people/rabenseifner Nobelstr. 19, D-70550 Stuttgart, Germany . (Office: Allmandring 30) _______________________________________________ mpi-forum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi-forum -- Anthony Skjellum, PhD Professor and Chair Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences Director, UAB Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research ("The Center") University of Alabama at Birmingham +1-(205)934-8657; FAX: +1- (205)934-5473 ___________________________________________ CONFIDENTIALITY: This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may be privileged. If you are not a named recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to another person, use it for any purpose or store or copy the information in any medium. Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail