Daniel Vega: Sun blogging at UFRJ

Hello, everyone.

Some great news: Sun Tech Days 2009-2010 in Brazil is coming! It's going to be held in Sao Paulo from December 8th to December 9th. Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris and/or NetBeans developers cannot miss this.

There is going to be talks on Java, JavaFX, Glassfish, OpenSolaris (DTrace) and a lot others!

The full agenda can be seen here.

This year's special guest is going to be with the Java programming language creator, James Gosling.


The official website is Sun Tech Days (in Portuguese).


Check it out!

Hello, everyone.

This weekend, on saturday the 19th, there is going to be an event of major importance for the software freedom community. The event is called Software Freedom Day (SFD) and it happens all over the world on the same day. Among the sponsors, there is Sun, Google and Ubuntu community.

Here in Rio de Janeiro, it will be held in UFF, a university located in Niteroi, 8 miles (13 km) away from Rio de Janeiro. The event is being organized by Leonardo Freitas, another Sun Ambassador.

The event's schedule can be seen here (see picture below) or at the website. You can also check for more information at the UFF OSUM website. All these informations are in Portuguese.

You don't wanna miss that chance, do you?

See you there!

Hello, everyone.

On September 17th, there will be an online conference about High Performance Computing. Speakers include not only Sun personnel talking about Sun solutions, but also managers from Intel Corporation and Univa UD talking about specific HPC industry.

The informations for date and time are:

 WHAT: HPC Virtual Conference Event
 DATE: Thursday, September 17, 2009
 TIME: 8:00am - 3:00pm  PT /  9:00am - 4:00pm MT / 10:00am - 5:00pm CT
        (3:00pm - 10:00pm GMT)
 REGISTRATION SITE: http://www.hpcvirtualevent.com/index.html

and presenters include:
    * Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems
    * Marc Hamilton, Sun Microsystems
    * David Padghem,  Council for Competitiveness, Policy Director for the HPC Initiative
    * Wes Shimanek, Strategic Marketing Manager, Technical Computing, Intel Corporation
    * Dr. Nash Palaniswamy, Senior Manager, Throughput Computing, Intel Corporation
    * Gary Tyreman, Vice President and General Manager,  Univa UD
    * Dr. James Leylek, Clemson University

The full day schedule is:

AGENDA:  2009 HPC Virtual Conference
    (NOTE - all times are listed below as U.S. Pacific time)

Time (PT)     Schedule of Events/Speakers
______________________________

8:00am     Show Opens     
8:30am     Keynote: Exaflops by 2020
            Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems
9:00am     Keynote Scheduled Chat
            Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems
9:30am     Business-Ready HPC and Cloud Computing
            Marc Hamilton, Sun Microsystems
10:00am Scheduled Chat
            Marc Hamilton, Sun Microsystems
10:30am Accelerating Your Applications And Scaling It Forward
            Wes Shimanek and Dr. Nash Palaniswamy, Intel Corporation
11:00am Scheduled Chat
            Intel Corporation
11:30am Using HPC to Drive Innovation in the Private Sector
            David Padgham,  Council on Competitiveness
12:00pm Scheduled Chat:  Industry View
            David Padghem, Council on Competitiveness
12:30pm The Time is Now for HPC Cloud Computing: Technology Overview and Case Study
            Gary Tyreman, Univa UD
1:30pm     Scheduled Chat
            Gary Tyreman, Univa UD
2:00pm     Industry View: Operational Experience with Sun HPC System in Automotive & Other Mobility Applications
            Dr. James Leylek, Clemson's CU-CCMS Center
2:30pm     Scheduled Chat:
            Dr. James Leylek, Clemson's CU-CCMS Center
3:00pm     Event Concludes

Please visit http://www.hpcvirtualevent.com for registration and further information about the presentations and sponsors.

See you!

Hey, everyone.

 

The news today are related to VirtualBox, Sun's virtualization software. For those not familiar with virtualization concepts and possibilities, I'd recomend checking this out.

Two days ago, on June 17th, VirtualBox 3.0 Beta was released. Now what's the big deal? Although it's only a beta version, which means it's meant for tests and evaluation only and should not be used on production machines, this version comes with some enhancements that greatly improve performance. As you can see here, VirtualBox now supports up to 32 virtual CPUs, which is great news for virtualized servers. Not only that, graphics had also an important role on this update. Direct3D is now supported by Windows guests and OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests.

 

So download it!, use it and evaluate it. Any suggestions or bug reports can be done here. 

 

See you! 

Hello, everyone.

I am glad to announce that yesterday, June 1st, was the official date for releasing OpenSolaris 2009.06.

For those who do not know, OpenSolaris is an open source operating system following the Solaris model, which build its reputation in stability throughout the years. Sun releases distributions from time to time and the last one was released on November 2008.

This release's new features can be found here. For administrators, among other things, OpenSolaris has included Project Crossbow, which makes network virtualization and resource management easier. For users, most development was done at the Time Slider feature, improving it. This can be checked out at Erwann Chénedé's blog.

Besides all that, OpenSolaris now came with an image for SPARC platform and a single image for x86/x64 platforms and all languages. It is also one of the first platforms to fully support Nehalem, Intel's new Xeon 5500 processor.

Now it's up to you. Download it (this link is for x86/x64 platforms), use it, send your feedback to OpenSolaris developer team and enjoy one of the most stable open source systems at this time!

See you!

Hello everyone,

Last Thursday, Victor and I did a presentation about some Sun Technologies, OSUM and SAI to Computer Engineering freshmen students. We chose some technologies that are currently performing a very important role in the IT industry worldwide. The topics we addressed were:
- Sun history
- Sun Campus Ambassador program
- Java + JavaFX
- NetBeans + Glassfish
- MySQL
- VirtualBox
- OpenSolaris + ZFS
- SunSPOT
- OpenOffice.org
- Zembly
- Project Wonderland
- Lustre
- Sun Academic Initiative
- Open Source Univertidy Meetup (OSUM)
- Certifications

The talk happened during a class called Introduction to Computer and Information Engineering, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. This class' purpose is to present all ranges of possibilities the IT world lays on the table. Hence, it was a very good opportunity to share all this open source- and Sun-related information. The students were quite interested, asking questions and how to learn more. We owe a special thanks to Jonas Dias, former ambassador who was present and helped us out, and Marta Mattoso, teacher and researcher, for providing us the time.

Also thanks for everyone who showed up and we look forward to bringing open source technologies closer to anyone who's interested at them.

See you!

Hello, everyone.

This time I'm here to promote a very good deal for those who look forward to get in touch with the open source community, share opinions and codes and also get all your questions and doubts answered. It is mainly an environment for students and professors, hence the name Open Source University Meetup, OSUM (pronounced like 'awesome'). Within this community, you'll be able to reach people not only from your own university, but also from universities accross your country and all over the world.

It is worth saying that this community is promoted by Sun and all its employees, including Campus Ambassadors, like myself, from all over the world, but it is not a Sun-product-only community. You're able to discuss everything that is related to open source. If you're still not convinced that this is a unique opportunity, Sun's got more to offer.

By joining OSUM, you get access to another Sun program, called Sun Academic Initiative (SAI), which provides students all over the world an incredible headstart when it comes to building your professional career. Through SAI, you can get certified on Sun technologies like Java and Solaris, both of which are very popular on the market. These are the certifications you can get through SAI:

- Sun Certified Java Associate (SCJA)
- Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP)
- Sun Certified System Administrator (SCSA)
- Sun Certified Network Administrator (SCNA)
- Sun Certified Web Component Developer (SCWCD)

Of course, this is not everything you can do on SAI. Besides that, you can access several training courses, some basic and some advanced, that will make a difference in your career. Along with these courses, you have ePractice Certification Exams, which are online exams to test your knowledge and prepare yourself for the real one.

A regular price for a certification like the ones mentioned above is around US$ 160.00. Through SAI, students get it for US$ 60.00 in US and US$ 40.00 in Latin America and Asia, just to give examples. It's a discount up to 70% for students in certifications.

So join today the open source community, OSUM, by accessing http://osum.sun.com. Find your university and your groups of interest and join them, participate on discussions and help the open source development.

Inside OSUM, you'll find the information you need to join the SAI program.

Please, feel free to ask any questions about it through here e-mail me at Daniel.Vega@Sun.COM.

Embrace this opportunity!

Hello, everyone.


Yesterday, Victor, Leonardo and I, all Campus Ambassadors in Rio de Janeiro, had a meeting with three well known guys from Sun. They are Angel Camacho (Technical Marketing Manager), Matthew Baier (Group Product Marketing Manager) and Jim McHugh (Vice President of Data Center Software). We talked about lots of things, including:

- OpenSolaris, its past and its future;
- OpenStorage, and how it's going to affect the immediate future on supercomputers' storages;
- open source and its great value to the development of new applications nowadays and how open source was created, was handled so far and is going to be handled on the future;
- Oracle's recent offer on buying Sun Microsystems;
- and more.

It was a very great meeting, for we had the chance to talk to well known people of the open source community and their vision on open source itself and Sun products, like OpenSolaris and OpenStorage.

This is a picture taken yesterday. From left to right: Matthew Baier, Victor Bursztyn, me (Daniel Vega), Leonardo Freitas, Jim McHugh and Angel Camacho.

Hello, everyone.

This time I'm here to invite everyone that's interested in Sun's HPC Solutions to attend Sun's annual HPC Consortium, which this year is going to be held in Hamburg, Germany. It is going to be held along with the annual International Supercomputing Conference (ISC09). The dates for the Consortium are June 21st and 22nd.

You can find more information at the event website: http://events-at-sun.com/hpc-hamburg09/

As of the moment of this post, the Sun HPC Consortium agenda is not yet done, but updates will be posted on the website above.

Also, for hotel details, please check http://www.starwoodhotels.com/lemeridien/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1857

For those willing to register, please go to https://events-at-sun.com/hpc-hamburg09/registration.php

Please note that the early bird rate is valid until May 21st.

Hello, everyone.

Today, March 23rd, the JavaFX Coding Challenge is being launched. It is a coding competition where both students and developers are invited to submit an innovative rich media application using JavaFX 1.1 and NetBeans 6.5.

The top 3 applications will receive prizes, as shown below:

• 1st Prize: US$ 25,000.00
• 2nd Prize: US$ 10,000.00
• 3rd Prize: US$ 5,000.00

Students, however, not only will compete for those three grand prizes, but also for a special student prize, which is US$ 1,500.00 for the three top applications. Besides all that, there are up to 100 honorable mention prizes of a US$ 25.00 Amazon Gift certificate.

The contest starts on March 23rd, 2009 and will be receiving submissions up to May 29th, 2009. All submissions will be judged during the month of June and the winners will be announced on the week of June 29th.

For more information, check out the JavaFX  Coding Challenge website.

Good Luck for everyone!