May, 2009
by Linwood Merritt
Lin started his data processing career in 1970 as a Simulation Analyst, has been a US CMG member since CMG84, and has been the Project Manager of the "Enterprise Wide Capacity and Performance" project of SHARE since August 1994.
Lin has published 14 CMG papers (not counting 1 additional for UKCMG 2003) and presented at 25 SHARE conferences. He won the CMG97 Mullen award for the presentation "Performance Data from the Server to the Intranet: Getting the Data and Reporting It," and presented it at UKCMG in 1998. He is now working as a mainframe Capacity Planner at Bank of America in Richmond, Virginia.
About the Author
Linwood Merritt, Bank of America
Southern CMG held its spring 2009 meetings in Richmond, VA, on April 23 and Raleigh, NC, on April 24. The region also booked the following sponsors for Richmond: Hypersoft (lunch) and ECJ Services Inc. (breakfast); and Raleigh: EMC (lunch) and Netuitive (breakfast). EMC also provided the Raleigh meeting location. Sponsorship keeps attendee expenses low (with meals provided) and allows the sponsor to give a presentation that is integrated with the technical agenda of each meeting. The technical content of both meetings is summarized below.
At the Richmond meeting, Igor Trubin's "Power of Control Charts" presentation discussed the theoretical and spreadsheet details behind his use of automatic statistical detection of data for detailed analysis. John Van Wagenen gave his 2008 J. William Mullen Award winning presentation, "So you want to manage your Z-series MIPS? Then detect & control application workload variance!" and followed it with the spreadsheet details behind variance analysis in "Pivot Tables/Charts -- Magic Beans without Living in a Fairy Tale." Kathy Walsh followed with her latest Washington Systems Center "z/OS Hot Topics", including zPCR enhancements, new profiling instrumentation in the SMF Type 23 record, HiperDispatch enhancements, and "cycle steering" with lowered clock speeds under certain conditions such as Modular Refrigeration Unit failure. Jim McGalliard presented "Benchmark Analysis of Multi-Core Processor Memory Contention", which discussed MP effects in benchmarks run by his colleague at FEDSIM, Tyler Simon. Peter Sevcik completed the Richmond program with "How to use Apdex for Service Level Management", discussing practical uses of the Apdex score which qualifies user response time satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 1.
At the Raleigh meeting, Igor Trubin, John Van Wagenen and Jim McGalliard repeated the presentations they gave at the Richmond meeting. Chris Molloy presented "Capacity Management for Cloud Computing", which discussed categories of cloud computing and the need for an understanding of the workloads to assess impacts on performance. Amit Sawant completed the Raleigh program with a discussion of visualization types, categories and examples in "Information Visualization: A View From 30,000 Feet."
The Southern Computer Measurement Group is planning to hold its next meetings in the fall of 2009. Please check the website at http://regions.cmg.org/regions/scmg/meetings.htm for details in the fall. Anyone interested in being a sponsor or presenter or who has any suggestions should contact scmg@cmg.org.