Un Posto al Sole: Finding My Place in the Sun

Update! All my SC08 student party photos now hosted here (because WordPress has a nice gallery feature that Roller lacks).

The SuperComputing conference every year attracts computer science students from all over the world who participate in various ways: as volunteers, as competitors in things like the Cluster Challenge, as part of SC's Education Program, and in a Broader Engagement initiative, run by Livermore Labs' Computing Applications & Research Department. It's a large and fascinating group, comprising students and educators from all over the world: China, India, Nigeria, Italy...

We wanted to give these students - current and future HPC developers - an introduction to Sun and our OpenSolaris HPC software developers' stack.

But they're already working hard this week, so we didn't want to lecture them. Instead, we threw a party!

We hired some local students to help (under the supervision of our own Diana Wadding), here shown blowing up balloons in the entryway of our venue, the Karma Lounge in downtown Austin. Also shown, coming in with a cooler, is Miguel of Ironworks Barbecue, who gave us full catering service with their very yummy barbecue (and a rich pasta salad for the vegetarians).

Apparently they liked it. ; )

Live music was provided by The Singhs, an international funk-rock band. 

Peter Parcek, guitar god.

We also had the DJ services of Brother Cleve with his huge collection of Bollywood music. Bhangra lessons (taught by Trishna Roy) brought lots of people onto the dance floor -  especially the Indian students, of course, but they were immediately joined by others, and we even had some interesting combinations of live rap and recorded Bollywood.

The dancers were joined by a very welcome special guest. In fact, everyone liked him so much that we gave him one of our t-shirts:

It wasn't all play: Sun folks such as Fritz Ferstl, Director of Grid Computing, were on hand to discuss current projects and the possibility of internships, and I have reason to believe we'll be hearing again from a number of these students.

The students clearly enjoyed the evening; at one point they even raised a cheer of: "Sun! Sun! Sun!" We enjoyed meeting them, and look forward to doing it again soon!