Community Input

PRObE receives community input through committees that provide high level guidance for the project.

PRObE is targeted at the needs of systems researchers in at least three communities: high-end or high performance computing, often publishing in the Supercomputing conference (SC), data-intensive scalable computing, recently publishing in the Operating System Design and Implementation conference (OSDI), and data and storage systems for both, mostly publishing in the File and Storage Technologies conference (FAST). Advisors and decision makers as well as users for PRObE will be drawn from these communities, and annual open meetings will be held in each community at an appropriate academic conference, such as SC, OSDI/SOSP and FAST.

PRObE is governed by four bodies:

  1. The PRObE Management Group, for day-to-day operations, made up of Probe PIs and full time senior staff;
  2. The PRObE Steering Committee, for strategic decisions and high-level planning, typically meeting twice a year, and made up of six systems researchers plus the management committee, mostly drawn from universities with a representative also from government and from industry;
  3. The PRObE Project Selection Committee, for allocating machine resources to proposals, teleconferencing monthly or as needed, made up of six systems researchers plus the management committee;
  4. The PRObE User Environment Committtee, for shaping the feature requests and service provisioning of the facility, interacting electronically, made up of six systems researcher plus the management committee.

The latter three committees will be staffed using established merit based selection processes such as used by academic special interest groups and top conference program selection committees. Probe governance will be revised as needed through consultation with the stakeholder communities. In the start-up phases the Steering Committee and the Project Selection Committee were merged into a single committee, and will be split when the need arises.

In addition, regular BoFs at these major conferences will provide a forum for broad community input to PRObE. A list of current and past events can be found on the events page.