Student Views and Reviews: Sun on Campus

Student Views and Reviews is actively seeking student reviews for publication on the MAIN Student Reviews page on Sun.com.   

We are looking for students to send pointers to blogs they have written about ANY Sun technology. It can be a blog giving tips for using OpenSolaris or a how-to install article on VirtualBox. It can be a review of OpenOffice or JavaFX. Just make sure it is a blog YOU wrote -- no "borrowing" work from others -- about a Sun technology. The blogs you send in will have a chance to be featured HERE on this main Sun Web site in the student portal.

This is a GREAT opportunity for you to show us your technical and communication skills! As many of you prepare to hit the job market within the next few years you should be seizing opportunities to show your range of talent -- every extra publication can count in a competitive marketplace -- so we expect many of you to contribute!

Additionally, many of you may have seen the new Q&A + Podcast that has been running here in Student Views and Reviews. With your blog contribution you will qualify for participation in that program, which will be featured on both Student Views and Reviews AND the top of this Sun Web site!

So, if you've written a blog in the past -- great, send in; if you haven't, then get busy! So, how do you submit your work? You can either post it to the comments below, leave a message on my OSUM page, or e-mail it to me at maijaliisa.burkert(at)sun.com. I am looking forward to reading your blogs and making the Student Reviews page on Sun.com really top notch with your content!

Attention students in Europe!  The Sun HPC Software Programming Challenge has just recently begun and there is a top prize of a Toshiba OpenSolaris laptop up for grabs! Students may work in teams of up to three members, with all members on the winning team receiving a laptop as well as a travel allowance to attend the Sun HPC Software Workshop in Germany.  Second- and third-place winners will receive new iPods.

The Sun HPC Software Programming Challenge 2009 looks to promote Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris amongst students by giving them an opportunity to compete in the design and implementation of the most scalable and best-performing implementation of a common parallel algorithm. 

The Sun HPC Software, Developer Edition 1.0 for OpenSolaris combines virtualization technology with a high performance computing platform.  The software includes the tools and technologies that enable you to develop, test, and deploy high performance computing applications. 

The package includes Sun Studio 12 u1 together with Sun Grid Engine 6.2u3 on top of an OpenSolaris 2009.06 installation and is all freely available for download. 

The winner will be determined by linking a special benchmarking application to your library and letting it run on a previously unknown SGE cluster installation.  See the contest guidelines for more information.

The Sun HPC Software Programming Challenge is open to students at any degree level in any discipline who are legal residents of any of the European countries listed in the rules. So check it out and pass the information along to all your (student) friends! The deadline for the contest is August 10.

I came across an interesting blog on OSUM today, and want to point it out to the readers of this blog as I know many of you will be able to offer suggestions.

Sethu is a student at the Sona College of Technology.  As an IT student he is looking for information on the skill set he should have as a future Computer Engineer.  His question goes beyond academics, to how he can (and should) establish and showcase his talents to make a good impression on a future employer (certificates, publications, conferences, contests, etc.).

Sethu is looking for suggestions on how to select the extra activities beyond academics to develop his skill set.  He indicates he will be graduating in 2011. 

I am sure there are plenty of students, campus ambassadors, and former IT students that are now in the work force, or about to enter that can offer Sethu some guidance, so please go here to read his blog in its entirety and offer him advice.

Those of you who attended JavaOne probably remember seeing Sun Campus Ambassador Denis Magda and his now-famous gloves in Java Utopia demonstrating his MinorityReport project.  Words cannot state how impressive the project is! Denis describes it best saying "we are using a pair of sensormotor-gloves with Sun SPOT on them to do different manipulations with JavaFX application remotely by hand movements."  

If you weren't able to make it to JavaOne, or missed the demo, don't worry -- it was captured in a few different places.

Here Denis demonstrates in a JavaOne Minute:

And here Denis shows JavaOne host Chris Melissinos how his project works:

As Denis has pointed out, because the project is open source, you can build your own MinorityReport! Congratulations to Denis for being one of the real stars of JavaOne 2009! 

Campus Ambassador Kevin Li has graciously shared the recap of his experience at JavaOne, and with his permission, I am publishing it here to share with Sun's student community.  

Hi all,

It is my greatest honor that I was there, with thousands of developers and students, participating in the 14th JavaONE conference.  As NING service is temporarily not available in China, I would like to share my experiences about JavaONE 2009 here with you.

From a simple idea many years ago and the Duke swinging his hands in the browser which made everyone in the world exciting, to today, billions of devices running Java, including personal computers, mobile phones, enterprise servers etc. it is the result of insistent innovation and the spirit of community and sharing.

In CommunityONE West, we heard from our top performance campus ambassadors, Hyejin Park from Korea, Tom Mix from Brazil, Felipe Cerda from Chile and Avinash Joshi from India, sharing their successful experiences about connecting students in universities in our OSUM community.  We also learned the open cloud platform of Sun Microsystems from David Douglas, Senior Vice President of Cloud Computing, and the latest features of OpenSolaris 2009.06 from OpenSolaris tech leads.  The OpenSolaris and Sun Cloud Party in the evening was a really cool party. The band, food, drinks and games bade everyone exciting and crazy.  It was the most impressive party I've ever seen.  (Keynote replay here).

From June 2 to June 5, over thousands of sessions were provided, I just couldn't believe that and wanna join all of the sessions!  But you know, it is impossible.  Fortunately, there was a special schedule for our students helping us to simplify the life.  Joining every proposed session, we got a stamp for the raffle every day at our OSUM Lounge in the pavilion.  The lucky ones got Sun SPOT and iPod touch in the raffle, and all of us had fun in this so called "Student Scavenger." 

The keynotes and technical sessions were amazing and unforgettable.  We learned the latest technologies from Sun Engineers, shared experiences with developers and JavaONE sponsors from all over the world.  In the pavilion, cool demos were shown everywhere and I think the most impressive demo was the Sun SPOT and JavaFX demo shown by Denis Magda, campus ambassador from Russia.

And of course, the most exciting moment, was talking with James Gosling around the table.  He shared his great experiences with us and gave many helpful suggestions to students.  Giveaway always is a traditional part and everyone gets dozens of gifts.  Ashwin told us that he got totally 20 T-shirts in JavaONE!

In addition, we also helped to introduce our OSUM community to students at the OSUM Lounge, record videos with Gary for sun.com and of course the JavaONE Minutes at java.sun.com/javaone!

Thanks to Lin, Andrea, Gary, Tzel, David and other campus ambassadors being with me, I had a great time in San Francisco.  The conference was amazing, all of the dinners and parties were funny and impressive, and San Francisco is a really beautiful city.  I would like to share my great experiences in San Francisco to all of my friends and members at OSUM.

See my pictures here and part of the videos here.

Best regards,

- Kevin Li

Many thanks to Kevin for this wonderful recap of his week and experience at JavaOne! And, to any other students who attended, please e-mail me at maijaliisa.burkert(at)sun.com so I can share them with the community!

Sun Campus Ambassador Renato Porto Puccini continues to test out different Sun software technologies and share his experiences with others.  Thank you Renato!

He recently published a blog that shows how to install Sun Studio on OpenSolaris.  Sun Studio software provides a C, C++, and Fortran developer toolchain for Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Linux operating systems.  As Renato notes, the Sun Studio IDE is focused on performance, and therefore "allows the creation of highly optimized programs from the viewpoint of use of system resources."

In Renato's blog he walks through the step-by-step installation process and has posted screen shots to make the installation even easier.

Again, many thanks to Renato for sharing his experiences in his blog -- please continue to do so!

And to all students that read this blog, please point me to where you have blogged about your experience with Sun's technologies or your tutorials, like Renato's.  You can ping me here on my OSUM page, or send me an e-mail at maijaliisa.burkert(at)sun.com.

Results are finally HERE...

First, thanks to all the participants for your submissions. You made the judges’ work very difficult. Keep up the great work!

We look forward to your participation in our upcoming contests. Stay tuned to this blog to learn about more opportunities for showcasing your talent and win great prizes.

Without further delay, the winners are:


Campus Ambassadors Category

Grand Prize Winner: Kolli Bharath, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, India (review, project) Second Prize Winners (alphabetically sorted by first name): 1. Aadhar Mittal, Delhi University, India (review, project) 2. Jose Maria Silveira Neto, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil (review, project) 3. Qi Cao, Wuhan University, China (review, project) 4. Vitorio Sassi, UFRGS, Brazil (review, project)   (shared with Ronaldo Prass)

Kolli Bharath

General Students Category

Grand Prize Winner: Tomas Augusto Muller, Universidade de Santa Cruz do Sul, Brazil (review, project) Second Prize Winners (alphabetically sorted by first name): 1. Ronaldo Prass, Unisinos, Brazil (review, project)   (shared with Vitorio Sassi) 2. Tejesh Morla, University of Illinois at Springfield, USA (review, project) 3. Varun Bhatia, University of Delhi, India (review, project)

Tomas Augusto Muller

The two grand prize winners will each get $500, and each of the second prize winners in both categories will receive $250. We will be sending you an email soon regarding prize shipment.

CONGRATULATIONS  to  all !!!