The Ponderings of a Hokie: John Edstrom - Campus Ambassador at Virginia Tech

On April 1st, 2009, Jim Fiori (Principal Field Technologist) came to Virginia Tech to speak on the topic of Performance Tuning.



Often ignored in the curriculum, application performance is a huge concern for many companies. Knowing how to "twist the knobs" of a system or an application to increase its performance is a valuable skill, with many companies looking to improve their software by tuning its performance. Jim touched on some of the important foundation knowledge - Operating Systems, Networking, Databases, Computer Architecture, Queuing Theory - one must have to be a solid Performance specialist.



He also discussed some of the issues/methods involved in tuning and improving an application's performance, such as Garbage Collection in Java, the subtle inner-workings of UNIX commands, and efficient multi-threading paradigms.



Later, Jim introduced DTrace to a crowd of students who had only a passing knowledge of the technology. DTrace's probes incur no overhead while not in use, thus allowing the Operating System to function normally. When probes are activated, key metrics about the system are collected and can be represented in a useful way.



Applications, System Calls, Users, and many more can be monitored and measured in a level of granularity never-before-available. The crowd of students were quick to discover the sheer power of DTrace, and posed many hypothetical use cases and applications for DTrace.



Jim pointed the students to the DTrace Toolkit to learn more about the full power of DTrace. Already, several students have gone out, downloaded OpenSolaris, installed it in Virtual Box, and started using DTrace.

Here is a link to his presentation: Performance Tuning with DTrace - Jim Fiori

The topic of Distributed Systems and Grid Computing have long been present in academia. Now, with the rise of so-called "Cloud Computing", companies are starting to get into the mix.



On January 28th, 2009, Curt Harpold came down and presented in front of the Association for Computing Machinery chapter at Virginia Tech. Curt's focus was on the implementation of Grid Computing, and how Sun Grid Engine could make many user's lives a lot easier.



The basic idea behind the Sun Grid Engine is providing abstractions. In a Grid Computing environment, many nodes are interconnected, forming a large pool of resources (CPUs, memory, etc.) for a program to use. However, in order for a program to successfully use all of the resources available on the Grid, the user must manage all of the resources by hand. This environment does not lend itself well to allowing for programs to run dynamically.



The Sun Grid Engine, on the other hand, abstracts and manages all of the resources of the Grid - thus allowing the user to be able to focus on writing programs. By invoking a certain command, the user easily puts his or her program "onto the Grid" and the SGE takes care of dynamically scheduling this program across all of its resources. Using some cool algorithms, it can even detect which node is likely to give it a faster response and dispatch it to that node.



The most amazing aspect, in my opinion (and in the opinion of a lot of the attendees), is the cross-platform nature of the SGE. Though the Master (Scheduler) daemon must be on either a Solaris or Linux system, all of the rest of the nodes can be running Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and more! Where this could provide a huge benefit is on existing heterogeneous systems. All someone would have to do is set up SGE on all of the machines and just like that...they're on a Grid!

Here is a copy of his slides.

Here is a video of his presentation.

On September 20, 2008, Sun organized the first-ever Software Freedom Day at Virginia Tech. The event was a resounding success and involved many in the VT community.



The idea behind Software Freedom Day is to celebrate Free/Open Source Software as a community. Because the community is so important to FOSS, I took it upon myself to involve as many people in the VT software community as possible.



At the presentation, four student groups were key in organizing and advertising the event. The Association for Computing Machinery, the Association of Women in Computing, the Virginia Tech Linux/Unix User's Group, and Free Culture at VT were all instrumental in coordinating the event. We were able to hand away A TON Sun swag in addition to free Ubuntu CDs. And of course, Sun was sure to give away free pizza and drinks.



I was the first presenter of the night, talking about some of the cool new technologies that Sun is putting out there. I showed off Netbeans, OpenSolaris, and DTrace. The crowd was very tech-savvy and immediately recognized the "cool" factor of some of these new technologies. I was also sure to discuss, from a corporate level, why Sun is so committed to open source. The message of FOSS really resonates with college students and I wanted to show them that they have a friend in Sun.



The next presenter was Jonathan Turner. He presented on a new programming language, Minnow, that he was working on. You can check out his work at http://www.minnow-lang.org/. After Jonathan's presentation, we all enjoyed some pizza courtesy of Sun. Following the intermission, Dr. Godmar Back (VT faculty and my Operating Systems professor) talked about a project he is working on called LibX (http://libx.org/). And finally, Mike Taczak, from the local company Mailtrust, presented on an open source project he was working on called Funambol (http://www.funambol.com/).



All in all, the event was a success. The VT community came together to talk about FOSS, free pizza and software was distributed, and Sun sponsored it all. Hopefully this will be indicative of the events for the remainder of the school year.

Check out my presentation!

I am truly honored to be able to announce that I have been featured on an SDN channel podcast.

http://blogs.sun.com/SDNChannel/entry/meet_john_edstrom_from_virginia

We recorded it a couple months back and it launched on March 27th. The website that was created to accompany the podcast was fantastic and I would say that with the overall quality of the podcast, it was well worth the wait.

Mike Coe (Campus Ambassador Coordinator) and Jordan Slott (Tech Lead for the Campus Ambassador Program) did a great job of keeping the flow and energy of the interview up. I was a little nervous going into the interview, but those two made it seem more like a conversation than a formal interview and I think that really comes through in the interview.

Being recognized for this is a great honor, and I'm very grateful to everyone involved (especially Eileen Allan :) ). On a side note - in case you have not seen it yet - I was also recognized as the Campus Ambassador of the Month some time ago. I don't know how much longer they'll keep my ugly mug up on the page, but both the podcast and the Campus Ambassador of the Month are great honors and I want to thank everyone involved with me this year because I really could not have done it without you.

Campus Ambassador of the Month
http://developers.sun.com/students/

SDN Podcast
http://blogs.sun.com/SDNChannel/entry/meet_john_edstrom_from_virginia

On March 12th, 2008, Dr. Bruce Haddon came to Virginia Tech to give a presentation entitled "The Future of Java". Dr. Haddon is a Sun Java Architect and was able to captivate the audience by highlighting how programming languages have evolved over the years and where he thinks they are headed.



The ACM chapter at Virginia Tech (of which I am a member) co-hosted the event. They provided free pizza and refreshments that helped to drive a big audience. An estimated 50 hungry Computer Science, Computer/Electrical Engineering, and Business Information Technology majors showed up to hear Dr. Haddon speak.



Dr. Haddon started off by telling the audience that "Those who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it", then proceeded to give us and in-depth history of programming languages. He showed why some languages have died and why others still flourish. He provided some code examples and provided just enough technical detail about the design of languages for the audience to follow along.



He then applied some of the lessons of the past to Java. Java is in the unique position of having over 4.5 million Java developers worldwide, with that number growing every single day. He showed how Java continues to grow, with its developers, through the JSRs (and even a brief mention of the cool new language Fortress).



With all freshman CS majors learning Java for two semesters, we had a lot of very knowledgeable students asking very interesting questions. "Will we see operator overloading? Will we ever be able to directly manage memory, like C++?" Dr. Haddon was very eager to listen to students wishes for the language as developers and I'm sure he will keep them in mind as Java continues to evolve.

Dr. Haddon's presentation

On February 28th, 2008, I held the fourth Sun Tech Talk of the year at Virginia Tech (and first this semester!). The topic was the Netbeans IDE and I would be delivering the talk. I'll admit that I was a little nervous to step up in front of an audience, but to combat my anxiety I decided to dedicate more time to learning about all of the features Netbeans offers. And in the end, I think that the work culminated in a great talk.



Instead of focusing on only several of its cool features, I decided to gear the talk more as an introduction to Netbeans for my audience. I started off by introducing Netbeans to a mainly Eclipse-using audience, highlighted many of the features unique to Netbeans, demoed a piece of software I had written, and provided free installation DVDs to get them all started.



The program that I showed off during the talk was a fairly simple model-view-controller program that controlled adding classes into a course catalog. I used the GUI builder to build the front-end GUI that could add a new class with specified title, number, department, instructor, etc. The GUI also displayed all current classes in the catalog and updated when a new class was added. I also created a back-end database table with relevant columns in which to store the class records. To tie the two together I built an intermediate Java class that loaded from and added to the database and that also helped in the display of the classes. It was a fairly simple program and I intended it to show the broad scope that Netbeans can handle of some of the features of the code editor.



Overall, the talk went very well. About 25 people showed up to the presentation, which was great considering it was the Thursday before Spring Break. The audience required a little winning over, after all most of them came from an Eclipse background. But as the features began to pile up, there was no ignoring Netbeans. My goal was not to make them all go out and un-install Eclipse and solely use Netbeans (a goal which would be misguided at best). Instead, I sought to show them that YES Netbeans is an enterprise-level IDE that competes with the likes of Eclipse and Visual Studio and NO I'm not asking you to make it your only IDE. I tried to show them how they can work Netbeans into many different types of projects so that they can try it for themselves and see what they like best. I think that particular message resonated very strongly and led many of the students to give it a try.

A link to my presentation:
VT Netbeans Presentation

On November 27th, 2007, we held the third and final Sun Tech Talk at Virginia Tech. The topic of this highly anticipated talk was Solaris. Dr. Harry Foxwell came down to Virginia Tech and delivered a talk to nearly 60 students (most of whom were heavy Linux users) and changed the way a lot of them viewed Solaris. He also dove into the new and exciting world of openSolaris, which turned a few heads.



On the outset of the speech, I noticed a lot of skeptical students in the audience. Some still believed in the antiquated view of Solaris - "slow, bulky, and not for me". I thought that this might be hostile territory for a Solaris tech talk - but Dr. Foxwell proved me wrong. He started out, wisely I believe, by giving a brief overview of the software industry today and its future as it pertained to students today. He focused on open source software, it's applications, and what the students should learn to excel. He also pointed to current trends such as virtualization and parallel programming and stressed their importance in academia and in business.



With the audience's full attention, Dr. Foxwell went on to talk about Solaris and openSolaris. He highlighted their growing popularity and the solid foundations on which they were built. Students were generally impressed by the similarities in openSolaris and a lot of the Linux distros they were used to. Then Dr. Foxwell decided to show off some of the more advanced features available, leaving students to wonder why other OS's did not support these features also.



He talked about ZFS the new File System and Volume Manager that I believe is the proverbial "wave of the future". He pointed out that even Mac OS X Leopard had adopted ZFS. As if that were not enough, he went on to do a demo of DTrace which allows users to debug their system to an unbelievable level. The students in attendance were smart enough to realize the potential of these systems and technologically savvy enough to implement them.



The talk went better than I could have expected. Dr. Foxwell brought down free openSolaris DVDs to hand out, and we raffled away some t-shirts as well. As is the developing trend at Sun Tech Talks here, students remained for over an hour after the talk. They were interested in everything Solaris. Dr. Foxwell provided insight not only into Solaris and openSolaris, but also into the computer industry itself. He did a great job interacting with the students and there has been a lot of positive feedback from the talk.



Link to Dr. Foxwell's presentation

On November 13th, 2007, we held the second Sun Tech Talk of the semester at Virginia Tech. The topic of discussion centered around, in my opinion, one of the coolest technologies Sun is putting out there: SunSPOTs.



David Simmons, who worked at Sun Labs, graciously came up to give the Tech Talk, bringing along a couple of other experts on SunSPOTs. Most, if not all, of the people in the audience had never before heard of a "SunSPOT", but the team made sure that they would not soon forget it. They did a great job of presenting an in-depth technical introduction and the crowd soon became much more interactive, eager to learn more.



After the introduction to the device, David and the group began to show off some demos of the device in full use. They started off with the bouncing ball and floating text demos, both of which impressed the audience. These two demos are staples of the SunSPOT for a reason, the simple nature of each one is universally appealing. As the SPOTs were passed around the room during the bouncing ball demo I saw people's jaws literally drop, I saw professors with smiles a mile wide, and I saw students pondering further uses of the device. They were beginning to understand the power of the SPOT.



The demos served as a great interactive introduction to the practical uses of the SPOT. The guys began to present more complex demonstrations of the accelerometers and other various sensors, and the audience stayed with them every step of the way. One of the demos that caught a lot of people's attention was one in which a 3-D SunSPOT on the computer mimicked the orientation of an actual SunSPOT.

By the end of the speech, a large portion of the audience simply did not want to leave. I must admit, even I wanted to see more. People stayed and viewed some code for the demos, amazed at the simplicity in the coding. Most of the demos were done in Netbeans, so it was also a great chance for the guys to show off the power of Netbeans.



One of the things that I noticed in the conversations of those who stayed after the speech was the overall interest expressed in the device's uses. Some of the students were talking about possible research projects and I'm sure professors who saw the presentation would keep it in mind for future projects. Sun, so far, has done a good job in making sure that students and professors have access to SunSPOTs, but we must keep it up. There is most assuredly a place for SunSPOTs in academia, the only problem is that most people do not know that they exist. I would strongly urge any Campus Ambassador out there to do a demo of SunSPOTs to generate interest on your campus. With the power of the SPOT, the possibilities are limitless.

On November 6th, 2007, the first (of many) Sun Tech Talks here at Virginia Tech was held. The topic was Sun's involvement in the video game industry and in specific, Project Darkstar. For the talk I could think of no better person than Chris Melissinos, Sun's Chief Gaming Officer.



Chris is an amazing speaker and he did an outstanding job of connecting with the students in attendance. In all, over 60 interested students listened to Chris's presentation. While most of the students were Computer Science majors, students from Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mathematics, and Industrial Systems were in attendance as well. The students ranged from freshman all the way up to Ph.D. candidates.



Jeff Bates, a Sun employee, drove all the way up from North Carolina to see the talk. Also, my father and fellow Sun employee Dave Edstrom came down for the talk and blogged about it as well.

The talk went a little longer than expected, but the students in attendance stayed for the entire presentation. Some even stayed after the presentation, munching on the free pizza and talking video games with Chris. I have been to many presentations like this before and I have never seen students as enthused as those who were present at this one.



The talk started at 7:30pm. Chris was approached by so many students after the talk that we did not end up leaving the room until 11:30pm. The students are still so enthused about the idea behind Project Darkstar and the ease with which it has been made available to students that they have been asking about forming a Darkstar Group that would work on a project using Darkstar as a foundation. More on that to come...

All in all, Chris was the PERFECT person to bring down and start of the year of Tech Talks. He blogged about it here. Also, we have made available his presentation and the audio from it.

Audio from the presentation
Chris's presentation

Here is a picture of Chris and me: