Systems-Facing Track Call, April 2024

Systems-Facing Track, Thursday April 18, 2024 @ 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/10a PT

Topic: Supply Chain Challenges & Strategy Discussion

Beginning in early 2020 the world faced supply and demand issues for every product across the vast worldwide supply chain. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt on every level but by the following year in the US, most consumer products were back on shelves and we no longer had to ration toilet paper. At this point four years later, auto manufacturers are mostly able to keep up with demand on new cars and we no longer find empty shelves at the grocery stores. However, many of us are still facing challenges with purchasing compute and related components as well as replacement parts for failing equipment. Some of these equipment delays are due to residual supply chain backlogs but others are due to larger demands in specific types of components like GPUs. Join us for a discussion on these challenges, hear what other centers are doing as workarounds for these problems, and work collectively to brainstorm possible alternative solutions to what may be our new normal.

Discussion facilitated by:
Dori Sajdak, Senior System Administrator, University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research
Brian Haymore, Sr IT Architect – HPC, Center for High Performance Computing, University of Utah