SCMG Meeting Richmond
September 27, 2007

Location:

Agenda:

Speakers:

Igor Trubin
Igor started his career in 1979 as an IBM 360/370 system engineer. In 1986 he got his Ph.D. in Robotics at St. Petersburg Technical University (Russia) and then worked as a professor teaching CAD/CAM, Robotics and Computer Science for about 12 years at the same University. Igor has published about 30 papers and made several presentations for different international conferences related to the Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Computer fields.

In 1999 he moved to the US and worked at Capital One Services, Inc. in Richmond as a Capacity Planner. His first CMG paper was written and presented by him in 2001 in Reno, NV. The next one, "Global and Application Level Exception Detection System Based on MASF Technique," won a Best Paper award at US CMG 2002 and was presented again at UKCMG 2003 in Oxford, England.

His CMG 2004 paper about applying MASF technique to mainframe performance management was republished in the IBM z/Series Expo. Igor continues to enhance his exception detection methodologies, and is currently a team lead for IBM Global Services in Richmond.

Rick Ralston
Rick Ralston has worked in Data processing for over 30 years. He's spent 26 of those years working in performance management and capacity planning, mostly on IBM mainframes. He's a contributor to the MXG-L listserv and an editor of CMG's web-zine Measure IT. Recently he has been involved with the IBM Sub-Capacity License Charge offering for z/OS.

Kathy Walsh
Kathy is an IBM Distinguished Engineer who supports the zSeries platform with a special focus on performance and capacity planning for zSeries servers and the z/OS operating system. Provides technical and project leadership to IBM clients on the use, deployment and benefits of zSeries technology. Extensive experience consulting with clients on the performance and management of their z/OS environments, often in support of customer critical situations. Areas of focus include support for zSeries processors including LPAR and zAAPs, Parallel Sysplex, Workload Manager, RMF, Batch Window issues, Processor Sizing, and support for software pricing. Kathy is a member of IBM's Academy of Technology and has spent the past several years working on the issues of skills development and collaboration technologies to foster distance learning.

Frank Bereznay
Frank is a long time member of the Computer Measurement Group and an active volunteer at the national and regional level. He, and his wife Shana, have supported the Southern California region for more than 20 years. Frank is currently with Kaiser Permanente, a large vertically integrated provider of health care services. He supports the National Information Technology Business Unit and is helping to implement an Electronic Medical Record application for the more than 8 million members who receive healthcare services from the Kaiser program. Previously, Frank was at the Automobile Club of Southern California for 13 years and held a variety of Data Center management positions.

Peter Sevcik
Peter Sevcik is president of NetForecast and is a leading authority on network traffic, performance, and technology. Peter has contributed to the design of more than 100 networks, including the Internet, and holds the patent on application response-time prediction. He tries to separate fact from hype and describe a vision of the networked future in his Business Communications Review magazine column. Peter is a senior member of the IEEE and serves on the conference advisory boards of Next Generation Networks and Networld+Interop.

Abstracts:

System Management by Exception, Part Final
Igor Trubin, IBM
Statistical Exception Detection System (SEDS) has been successfully used for more than seven years to automatically produce web-based exception reports and smart alerts against the performance data warehouse for a large, multi-platform environment. This paper starts with an overview of how SEDS uses SPC and MASF techniques and how SEDS could be used as a part of Lean/Six Sigma. Then it focuses on the memory usage exceptions that SEDS captures to proactively identify server and application performance issues. (Presentation)

Using SAS/Graph to Display Performance and Capacity Data
Rick Ralston, IBM
This presentation briefly describes how to use SAS/Graph on z/OS to build graphs and display them using the HTTP server. z/OS is the author’s principle SAS platform. The majority of the presentation tells how to build and use heat charts to display 3 dimensional data in 2 dimension graphs. This is not platform specific.
(Presentation)

Did Something Change? Using Statistical Techniques to Interpret Service and Resource Metrics.
Frank Bereznay, Kaiser Permanente
In a perfect world, one would always know the answer to that question. Unfortunately, nobody works in a perfect world. This paper will explore statistical techniques used to look for deviations in metrics that are due to assignable causes as opposed to the period to period variation that is normally present. Hypothesis Testing, Statistical Process Control, Multivariate Adaptive Statistical Filtering, and Analysis of Variance will be compared and contrasted. SAS code will be used to perform the analysis. Exploratory analysis techniques will be used to build populations for analysis purposes.

This paper received the J. William Mullen award at the 2006 CMG Conference in Reno, Nevada.
(Presentation)

A Queue Simulation Tool for a High Performance Scientific Computing Center
Jim McGalliard, NCCS
The NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center provides high performance highly parallel systems to a community of computational Earth and space scientists. Long running and highly parallel jobs are common in the workload. NCCS management structures batch queues and allocates resources to optimize system use and prioritize workloads. NCCS technical staff use a locally developed discrete event simulation tool to model the impacts of evolving workloads, potential system upgrades, alternative queue structures and resource allocation policies.

Sponsors:

	MVS Solutions Inc. provides software solutions for the improvement of batch processing in a JES2 and Workload Manager environment.
	BMC Software enables you to monitor and manage business services, along with the technology infrastructure supporting them—applications, data, systems and networks—simultaneously.