Saturday November 25, 2006

OpenSolaris, IIT Kanpur and glimpses of North India
Each time I talk about Solaris / OpenSolaris and try to focus on A particular feature of it, the session ends up generating curiosity about a different feature. There is just so much there and I fail to predict which feature might awe the audience !

And the fact that it's source code is available, there is virtually no end to how innovative one can get with it. The recent cover story featuring a third year computer science student's ( who happens to be a sun campus ambassador ) unique feat of putting the entire OS onto a pen drive illustrates just that. And I am sure there will be more such stories in near future.

As part of the university engagement program, I had an opportunity to share my views on OpenSolaris with the IIT K students , as a guest lecturer.

IIT Kanpur is the first Institute in India to start Computer Science education. It was a humbling experience getting to know various things such as the history of IIT K CSE department, their SUN Technology adoption, and the research projects, with Dr. Sanjeev K Agarwal, Professor, CSE and Dr. Manindra Agarwal, HOD, CSE IIT K who happens to be a Clay Research award winner for devising an algorithm for primality testing. At the same time, talking about OpenSolaris to some of the most talented students in India was real exciting stuff.

After giving them an overview of OpenSolaris, I explained Fair Share Scheduler, Solaris Resource Management, and Solaris Containers technology. I don't remember when was the last time I used the chalk stick ! but felt so much comfortable to switch off the slide show and use the board instead, for a while. And then demo'ing how CPU shares come in action, on a laptop with the latest OpenSolaris build was FUN. The next day, Pramod Batni's DTrace talk was the highlight of our trip.

The DTrace one liners perfectly showing the intrinsic details of what's happening at the lowest level when a solaris command is used, or an application is run really seemed to amaze the audience. That's what I was talking about in the first few lines of this post. I thought containers would prove to be the most impressive feature, but it looked like DTrace literally hijacked the minds of most of them And why not, it's unique, It's awesome and it is arguably the coolest feature any OS has had so far. I also talked to the three very enthusiastic and energetic campus ambassadors. Kshitiz Garg, Vikas Gelera and Madhuresh Agarwal

During our informal discussions, the students and the professors mentioned about the availability of SUN machines and solaris environment with root access. Although the IIT K lab is well equipped, extra efforts are generally required to provide root access, and this is a common issue. One of the things, I suggested them to explore in future is the possibility of deploying OpenSolaris and then creating Solaris Containers which will prove to be perfect sandbox environment for each student. They get a solaris instance *with root access*, and still multiple students can share one system ! We also talked about the activities that they can conduct during their Dec. break. Something like a java programming contest, with netbeans as the IDE and Solaris as the platform. Thanks to Rohan I had a lot of netbeans installable CDs to hand over to them.

Anyway, ... Just like extracting petrol from crude oil is probably what refineries mainly do, there are so many petroleum by-products. The by-products of my IIT K visit were some rare and unusually joyous moments. The excellent atmosphere and guest faculty buildings of IIT Kanpur campus where I was thrilled like a kid to find peacocks freely roaming around.

Outside, a different, yet very familiar North Indian environment, culture and people. All the time, my ears had a strangely pleasant feeling of listening to pure Bhojpuri dialect. The north indian food, be it Delhi, Kanpur or Lucknow, was fantastic ! On my way to Lucknow, I spotted the funny and famous "Child" Beer board as well. A sight that caught the attention of even a teetotaller like me. Spotted an elephant walking across the road right next to the New Delhi railway station. Was kind of amused to see the tiny little Lucknow Amausi Airport.

At the same time, the Kanpur to Lucknow drive was as smooth as Bangalore - Mysore highway or San Francisco to San Jose drive if not better, thanks to the excellent road. The impressive quality of Delhi roads, the in flight service, the Indira Gandhi airport, Delhi Metro rail were some things completely in contrast with whatever I have mentioned earlier.

Posted by chiplunkar ( Nov 25 2006, 02:14:03 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [14]