ExCL June Meeting 2026

2 minute read

June 2026 ExCL meeting slides.

It appears that you don't have a PDF plugin for this browser. You can click here to download the PDF file.

Below is a LLM-generated summary from the meeting slides.

🚀 ExCL Monthly Update — June 2026

This month’s meeting featured spotlights on data versioning tools for ML workflows, an operations and procurement update, a hardware redeployment note, and an open discussion on performance-monitoring access.

📁 Data Versioning Tool Spotlights

DVC (Data Version Control) — dvc.org

  • Works well with ExCL: data can be stored in a shared cache in the project folder, which can also serve as remote data storage outside of ExCL
  • dvc repro reproduces a pipeline by figuring out what changed and rerunning only the affected stages
  • See the DVC Quick-Start Guide in the ExCL User Docs

LakeFS — lakefs.io

  • Git-like version control for a data lake
  • Provides a unified, high-performance, secure API over versioned, reproducible, and auditable storage
  • Integrates with common data/ML tooling (Spark, pandas, Jupyter, MLflow, TensorFlow, langchain, and more) and backs onto POSIX, S3, GCS, Azure Blob, and other S3-compatible storage

🛠️ Operations and Procurement

Most recent operations work has been internal and infrastructure-focused:

  • Updates to respond to well-known kernel vulnerabilities
  • More frequent update schedules going forward, likely aligning to a monthly update/reboot cadence
  • Extensive work on account management to reduce staff overhead and the opportunity for errors
    • Accounts are being reviewed for PAS compliance; PAS will become a requirement on all accounts (low effort for ORNL staff members)
    • PAS requests for foreign national researchers have substantial lead times (about four weeks)
  • Procurement proposals are in motion — now is the time to get research-enabling suggestions and requests to your systems engineering team

🖥️ ExCL Updates

  • The former HYP100 system (4x V100, 4x MK100) is now in the ExCL laboratory envelope (in K200)
  • Maxwell will be redeployed next week as an ExCL-standard configured system; emergency access is available before redeployment is complete

💬 Questions / Projects / Comments / Discussions

  • Recordings are available via the link in the newsletter
  • Discussion on how to provide solo access for performance analysis, and how that would affect GitLab runners
  • Interest in performance monitoring via btop, and whether to extend user access to Grafana/check_mk

📌 Summary

June’s meeting highlighted two data-versioning tools (DVC and LakeFS) for ML and data-lake workflows, continued operations and account-management hardening, a hardware redeployment (Maxwell), and an open discussion on expanding performance-monitoring access for users.

You May Also Enjoy