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| 1 | +<!--#set var="title" value="SRCF AGM of 17 March 2024" --> |
| 2 | +<!--#include virtual="../inc/header.html" --> |
| 3 | +<h1><!--#echo encoding="none" var="title" --></h1> |
| 4 | +<p><strong>Venue:</strong> Intel Lab in the William Gates Building and <a href="https://meet.jit.si/SRCF_AGM_2024">https://meet.jit.si/SRCF_AGM_2024</a></p> |
| 5 | +<p><strong>Time:</strong> 15:00</p> |
| 6 | +<p><strong>In attendance:</strong></p> |
| 7 | +<ul> |
| 8 | + <li>James Steiner (jas330, outgoing Chair)</li> |
| 9 | + <li>Mathew Blowers (mb2528, outgoing Junior Treasurer)</li> |
| 10 | + <li>Nils André (na600, outgoing Secretary)</li> |
| 11 | + <li>Richard Allitt (rsa33, Sysadmin)</li> |
| 12 | + <li>Edwin Balani (eb677, Sysadmin)</li> |
| 13 | + <li>Daniel Carter (dcc52, Sysadmin)</li> |
| 14 | + <li>Prof. D. A. Floudas (damf1)</li> |
| 15 | + <li>Frances J. Foster (fjf20)</li> |
| 16 | + <li>George Ogden (go281, President of Cambridge University AI Society)</li> |
| 17 | + <li>Marno van der Maas (mv380)</li> |
| 18 | +</ul> |
| 19 | +<p><strong>Apologies:</strong></p> |
| 20 | +<ul> |
| 21 | + <li>Brychan Thomas (bt416, outgoing Publicity officer)</li> |
| 22 | + <li>Bekalu Terefe-Zenebe (btt31)</li> |
| 23 | +</ul> |
| 24 | +<h2>Reports</h2> |
| 25 | +<h3>Chair's report (given by James Steiner)</h3> |
| 26 | +<ul> |
| 27 | + <li>Held a hackday and freshers squash and had a stall at freshers fair in Michaelmas.</li> |
| 28 | + <li>No events held in Lent and Easter.</li> |
| 29 | +</ul> |
| 30 | +<h3>Treasurer's report (given by Mathew Blowers)</h3> |
| 31 | +<ul> |
| 32 | + <li>The society regained access to its bank account the week prior.</li> |
| 33 | + <li>The proctors contacted the society the week prior letting us know we are at risk of de-registration.</li> |
| 34 | +</ul> |
| 35 | +<h3>Publicity officer's report (given by Brychan Thomas, read by James Steiner)</h3> |
| 36 | +<ul> |
| 37 | + <li>It was agreed that the anniversary dinner would be held in the curry house instead of a college to better represent the history of the SRCF and lower the barrier to entry.</li> |
| 38 | + <li>The new committee needs to decide upon a date to host it, perhaps by sending out a choice of potential dates to sysadmins and previous committees to see when availability is greatest.</li> |
| 39 | + <li>We gained access to the SRCF’s Twitter account but not Facebook.</li> |
| 40 | + <li>The SRCF only has 11 followers on Twitter, it might be worth putting a link to the account on the website if the next committee is going to use it.</li> |
| 41 | + <li>There was some interest in volunteering in the freshers' fair and squash, but there isn’t really a pathway for such people to actually get involved beyond hackdays.</li> |
| 42 | + <li>Perhaps the new committee could look into running a volunteer induction session with the sysadmins to try and get people involved?</li> |
| 43 | + <li>More frequent MOTD updates would be good, possibly by making it possible for committee members to publish them.</li> |
| 44 | +</ul> |
| 45 | +<h3>Sysadmins' report (given by Edwin Balani)</h3> |
| 46 | +<ul> |
| 47 | + <li>Edwin: The sysadmins have been left mainly unchanged.</li> |
| 48 | + <li>Edwin: There is still very little student representation in the sysadmins which is problematic as the primary demographic is students.</li> |
| 49 | + <li>Edwin: Most current sysadmins joined as students and are still able to help out through being physically located near Cambridge or giving their time remotely.</li> |
| 50 | +</ul> |
| 51 | +<h4>Technical aspects</h4> |
| 52 | +<ul> |
| 53 | + <li>Edwin: The SRCF has been largely in maintenance mode for the past two years. Sysadmins spend most of their time taking care of problems that arise with existing tech rather than developing new tech or improvements.</li> |
| 54 | + <li>Edwin: The slow performance of the oversubscribed web server, the inability to run containers in a multi-user system, and the SRCF's tech becoming less relevant as times goes on, especially to the people most likely to use it, are long-standing problems that have been noted for the past five years.</li> |
| 55 | +</ul> |
| 56 | +<h5>Upcoming maintenance activites</h5> |
| 57 | +<ul> |
| 58 | + <li>Edwin: Ensuring mail sent from the SRCF remains deliverable as inbox providers (in particular Google and Microsoft) tighten their restrictions on mail authentication. Mail is increasingly outright rejected rather than being marked as spam.</li> |
| 59 | + <li>Edwin: In order to improve web performance the web server needs to be re-architected as scaling the already single large machine is unlikely to increase performance.</li> |
| 60 | + <li>Edwin: The SRCF does not need more hardware or more physical space although newer hardware would be welcome and SSDs to replace spinning disks could improve performance.</li> |
| 61 | + <li>Daniel: The incoming mail architecture needs to be re-worked as it currently relies on infrastructure provided by the university which will no longer exist in September.</li> |
| 62 | + <li>Edwin: The university has instructed those dependent on its inbound mail relaying to switch to Microsoft hosted services or find their own solution. It is undecided whether the SRCF will run its own mail acceptance from the internet or delegate to another entity.</li> |
| 63 | + <li>Frances: An option might be the provider of the cantab.net (as well as other universities), Aluminati, based in Newmarket.</li> |
| 64 | + <li>Richard: The SRCF may want to provide a replacement for legacy raven in anticipation of its withdrawal. Perhaps a shim similar to hades (when hermes shutdown).</li> |
| 65 | +</ul> |
| 66 | +<h2>Elections</h2> |
| 67 | +<h3>Chair</h3> |
| 68 | +<ul> |
| 69 | + <li>Mathew Blowers nominates self. Seconded by Edwin Balani. Unanimously elected.<br> |
| 70 | + <em>Mathew was previously on the committee as Treasurer, giving the society |
| 71 | + access to its bank account back and wants to increase student interest |
| 72 | + going forward by running more events and making a clearer way to |
| 73 | + introduce new people that would be interested in becoming sysadmins.</em> |
| 74 | + </li> |
| 75 | +</ul> |
| 76 | +<h3>Secretary</h3> |
| 77 | +<ul> |
| 78 | + <li>Nils André nominates Bekalu Terefe-Zenebe. Seconded by James Steiner. Unanimously elected.<br> |
| 79 | + <em>Bekalu has been present at quite a few events held by the SRCF.</em> |
| 80 | + </li> |
| 81 | +</ul> |
| 82 | +<h3>Treasurer</h3> |
| 83 | +<ul> |
| 84 | + <li>Remains vacant.</li> |
| 85 | +</ul> |
| 86 | +<h3>Publicity officer</h3> |
| 87 | +<ul> |
| 88 | + <li>Remains vacant.</li> |
| 89 | +</ul> |
| 90 | +<h2>Other business</h2> |
| 91 | +<h3>Enquires about the status of the SRCF</h3> |
| 92 | +<ul> |
| 93 | + <li>Prof. Floudas made enquires about the number of registered and active users the SRCF had, the location of the servers and why it is that students seem to feel the services are not as important as they used to be, mentioning that he believes the SRCF is the most important society at the university.</li> |
| 94 | + <li>Edwin mentioned that he believes that the society has done well for itself surviving through COVID-19, thanks in part to the very low running costs that the SRCF operates in.</li> |
| 95 | + <li>Edwin: Some of the servers are with the SU's servers in the UIS offices in West Cambridge in the Roger Needham building. Additionally the SRCF has a few servers in the Computer Lab's data center. Lastly there are some netapp storage servers donated by the Computer Lab in the West Cambridge Data Center. In all these cases network and power are provided free of charge which is essential to the SRCF's financial situation.</li> |
| 96 | + <li>Edwin: There are probably around two to three thousand open accounts excluding closed user accounts that are still members in a social sense.</li> |
| 97 | + <li>Edwin: The two biggest services in volume are web hosting and email/mailing lists with societies and groups making the majority of users, some of which may not be fully conscious is hosted on the SRCF.</li> |
| 98 | + <li>Daniel: There were 451 unique user (including 8 sysadmins) logging into pip, the mail shell server, over the last year.</li> |
| 99 | + <li>Edwin: There are an uncountable number of users that rely on websites hosted by the SRCF.</li> |
| 100 | + <li>Edwin: Some societies have been moved off of the SRCF because of web performance issues.</li> |
| 101 | + <li>George mentioned that in order to mitigate slowness with WordPress, the CUAI's website is a single static HTML page.</li> |
| 102 | +</ul> |
| 103 | +<h3>Prof. Floudas suggests to be co-opted as Senior Advisor to the SRCF</h3> |
| 104 | +<ul> |
| 105 | + <li>As a user of the SRCF since it's first few years more than two decades ago Prof. Floudas would like to expression his gratitude by contributing some of his free time. He therefore suggests to be co-opted to the position of Senior Advisor to the SRCF.</li> |
| 106 | + <li>Prof. Floudas would be able to help navigate the University's bureaucracy as someone who understands its pretty obscure regulations such as getting off the hook from the Proctors.</li> |
| 107 | + <li>Prof. Floudas would also be able to organize meetings and dinners.</li> |
| 108 | + <li>Prof. Floudas believes that most importantly he would be able to provide continuity and organizational memory.</li> |
| 109 | + <li>The option to co-opt Prof. Floudas to the position of Senior Advisor is left to be made, at a future time, by the committee elect.</li> |
| 110 | +</ul> |
| 111 | +<h3>Possible hardware donation from a member of CUAI</h3> |
| 112 | +<ul> |
| 113 | + <li>George: A member of CUAI would like to donate GPUs to the SRCF. The aim is to have a system similar to the current HPC that can give individual users access to "compute" suitable for deep-learning workloads. CUAI would also donate any hardware necessary for this to take place (CPUs, Power supplies, secondary storage...) and shipping will be arranged by either CUAI or CuCaTs at no cost to the SRCF.</li> |
| 114 | + <li>George: There is an unmet demand for this as access to the HPC cluster is limited to those working with a supervisor and CUAI members often ask how they could get access to "compute".</li> |
| 115 | + <li>George: This has been suggested before but I wanted another chance to meet with the committee to propose this, have someone I'll be able to contact and work with going forwards so that this can happen and check that people are happy for this to happen.</li> |
| 116 | + <li>Edwin points out that there have been multiple requests over the past year that have been hard to distinguish in terms of whether they're from the same group of people or with the same purpose asking odd questions such as very specific questions about how much space the SRCF has or how to deliver hardware to the SRCF.</li> |
| 117 | +</ul> |
| 118 | +<!--#include virtual="../inc/footer.html" --> |
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