European Edu & Research Conference Blog
Jonathan Schwartz kicked off the conference with a video greeting, reaffirming Sun's commitment to education.
Joe Hartley, VP of Global Education and Research for Sun opened the conference and invited a campus ambassadors from one of our Open Source University Meetup, or OSUM (pronounced "awesome") groups to speak about the WaterWell Project. As Joe said, when we first started the campus ambassador program, we never envisioned it would inspire students to work on projects like this which aim to address water quality monitoring in developing countries using SunSpot sensor technology.
The second campus ambassador guest, Alper Celik, is working on a project to create a router using commodity Sun servers and the OpenSolaris CrossBow technology, and has a business plan to productize it. If only Michael Dell had OpenSolaris when he started. My apologies to our campus ambassadors, your names flashed up on the screen too quickly for me to write it down. Leave me a comment and I will update the text.
Joe then talked about some examples of participating in communities via FaceBook. So you guessed it, lets see what happens with the FaceBook group I just created, "Sun EERC 2009". Joe also gave an update on Sun's Cloud Strategy.
Peter Tandy from Sun now presenting on the New Paradigm in Managing Data: Sun's Open Storage Strategy. I better listen as I have some storage slides in my presentation for tomorrow and don't want to repeat anything.
Speaking of my presentation, I do have it loaded on the Sun Cloud and if the A/V folks let me, will do a live demo tomorrow of OpenOffice "open from cloud" and do my presentation from the cloud.
Peter giving a great overview of Sun's open storage strategy and products. Talking about how SSD-Flash technology is changing the economics of storage. We of course have standard form factor SSD-Flash disks in our Sun Storage 7000 appliance today as well as for many of our commodity servers, but not everyone has a spare disk slot in their server. So we will be putting flash into a lot of different form factors, if everyone shows up on time for my opening talk tomorrow, I might even give a sneak peak at one of our future SSD-Flash products.
Next up, Future of Storage and Data Management by Professor Alexander Reinefeld – Head of Computer Science, Zuse-Institute Berlin In case you don't recognize the name Konrad Zuse Wonderful presentation on the challenges with data explosion. A good overview of Scalaris a scalable, transactional, distributed key-value store developed at Zuse. You know it must be good if there is a Google Code project for it.
Closing talk of the day, Collaborative Environments and Collaboration Tools for Distributed Work Projects Steve Heller – Sun Lab's Director Principal Investigator Collaborative Environments. Always amazing to hear all the things going on at Sun Labs. Perhaps a bit late in the day for Fortress Code example on computational gradient, but yes, the Fortran code is a lot worse. But Molecule Visualization by Free University Berlin using Project Wonderland was pretty cool.