Taylor L Groves: Work, Personal, General

Wow, I feel like I'm about to pass out after this week's overload of activities.  For those of you that didn't know; Super Computing 08 was held in Austin this year. In conjunction with SC08 Sun hosted it's HPC Consortium 08 in Austin.  This was great news for the campus ambassadors in the area who got the opportunity to tap into Sun's experience in the field.

The weekend started off great when Conrad Geiger and Jeremy Deckert of Sun told us local CA's we would be able to attend Sun's HPC Consortium.  The Consortium was truly first class.  Held at the Austin Hilton, we had access to all the latest presentations and news in Super Computing, and most importantly as a college student - some high quality grub.

On the first day Marc Hamilton opened up the session, prepping us for what was in store, it was all new and exciting for me being a student and getting my first taste of HPC.  We were brought up to speed on everything Sun is doing in Open Storage, Lustre, Solid State Disks, Sun's involvement in the Linux community, virtual machines and more.  No matter who you talked to everyone sang praise for Sun's products.  Prof. James Leylek of Clemson University discussed how Sun fit his HPC needs and passed all acceptance testing beyond anything he could have imagined.

After the first day ended everyone was treated to Salt Lick BBQ at the Fire-Lake Event Center. The food couldn't have been better. With live music playing and a packed party, I got a chance to meet employees and customers alike. Individuals from: San Diego, Quebec, Tokyo, Boston, Boulder, Milwaukee, and just about everywhere else.  Everyone from out of the state got a good entry on Texas food and music.  Below is a picture of the area getting ready for the event.

The next day I woke up early to get back to the Hilton to see Andy Bechtolsheim – a chief architect at Sun give a presentation, on Sun's HPC storage road-map. People were telling me, “You want to make sure your here in time for Andy.”; They were right, it was 8:45 A.M. And all I can say is... he knows his stuff. I can't debrief on everything he showed us due to NDA but I can say that there's a great line-up for Sun this upcoming year. Andy was followed up with another killer presentation from Karl Schulz on the work being done at TACC (whose Ranger is #4 on the top 500 list and running on Sun's Hardware).

If hearing about the work wasn't cool enough we were all given tours of it afterwards :).

Number of Nodes: 3,936

Number of Processing Cores: 62,976

Total Memory: 123TB

Peak Performance: 579.4TFlops

Total Disk: 1.73PB (shared) 31.4TB (local)

I was pretty tired after the tours and the presentations but the events kept coming. Sun hosted a Student Party at the Karma Lounge in Austin for student volunteers at SC08. I got to meet some students from all over and saw some old friends from Texas State University. You can read more about this party and see pictures at Deirdré Straughan's blog. This has been a pretty long post but I have an upcoming post on SC08 itself, so check back soon. Additionally I have a lot of video that will be coming up in the near future.

Software Freedom Day 2008 was a big hit at Texas State University! We had a great turnout of ~50 students and professionals all interested in how they can expand their knowledge of Free and Open Source Software.

We discussed how trends in software development show a demand collaboration, and open source technology. Everyone gained a new understanding to the meaning of free; what it is to your wallet but more importantly how software should not hinder you, but instead assist your endeavors. After I finished my brief presentation the community really got together and celebrated.

The range of participants was truly inspiring. Individuals supporting Ubuntu, Mint Linux and other distro's came, shared their knowledge and gave OpenSolaris a try. OpenSolaris didn't let any of them down either, numerous people commented on its ease of use, and how they hadn't imagined such a friendly face on Solaris. Participants were able to interact and explore whatever technologies they desired. All around the room you would hear conversations of Python, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu, Java and OpenOffice.

The event originally scheduled from 5PM to 7PM kept going. I don't know how long people would have stayed but at 8PM the school needed us gone. I packed up any extra food; this being the international sign that its time to leave, and about 13 of us headed to my apartment where we LAN'd and hung out until the morning.

I've got some pictures coming!!

Software Freedom Day 2008 is fast approaching.  And Texas State is celebrating a day before everyone else on Friday, September 19th, 2008!

Don't know what Software Freedom Day is?  It is a worldwide event celebrating everything that is free and open source in life.

The mindset of open source is taking over.  You can see it everywhere: OS's, Browsers, Games, Text Books, even large organisms like Wikipedia thrive on the the wave of information that the internet has made available.  I see Software Freedom day as a recognition of the changes that are sweeping over the world.  Borders are being torn down while society is sharing, learning, and profiting from these collaborations of data.  Come and participate in the phenomenon that we so often take for granted.

When: September 19, 2008: 5PM to 7PM

Where: Texas State University, San Marcos Texas, LBJ Student Center 3.5-1

Free Food, Free Drinks, SWAG

Demos, Guest Speakers, and getting to know the individuals you see everyday in class, but didn't think they were as interested in Open Source as you are.  Both AITP and EXE Texas State Chapters will be present at the event.

Sun Microsystems plays a major role in Open Source development, and is the largest contributer to to the Open-Source Community in the world.  Additionally SUN provides the food and drinks.  Thanks SUN!

The festivities continue with a LAN party down at my place.  All are welcome until the circuit blows.

Enjoy,

Taylor Groves

The campus ambassador program is back!  Summer is over and I'm ready to jump back into SUN's program.  The new campus ambassador community is really nice.  It's got a feel similar to facebook, or any other social networking site with the addition of a wiki and forum.

Gary Serda gave a presentation over Elluminate Live that was really motivating in preparing for the new semester.

 For those of you Computer Science Students at Texas State I will be sending out SUN's SAI program information shortly.  So you will all be able to start your training and get some knowledge of some really cool stuff.

Take Care,

Taylor Groves

This meeting was a lot of fun. I picked up Will St. Clair from UT and we headed to the Sun Campus towards Round Rock (a very nice place). There were two presentations: one on Netbeans features from Gregg Sporar, and an in depth presentation on Solaris Dtrace from Angelo Rajadurai. I was amazed at how in depth Dtrace functionality was. The presentation brought and about an entirely new light to Quality Assurance and debuging. Besides the presentation pizza/beer/soda/swag was given out throughout the evening.

I know everyones schedule is busy, but this Thursday November 29, 2007 I will be doing a Netbeans 6.0 Demo at Texas State University.  This demo will be aimed at beginners and hopefully a good number of people will gain some insight into Java and Sun Microsystem's IDE Netbeans.  The presentation should last around 45 minutes with time for questions at the end.  If you can find time around the finals:

Derr. 240 Texas State University

5:30 PM  Thursday November 29, 2007

 Hope to see you there !!

 -Taylor Groves

This event was well worth the time. I organized a carpool with several members of the Texas State computer science fraternity EXE http://cs.txstate.edu/exe . I had students comment afterwards, that they were amazed at how accommodating the event was. The NIS to LDAP migration was something we all knew very little about, but by the end of the presentation everyone had absorbed a good deal of new information. The food that was provided was great. A lot of free giveaways Heres a summary of what you missed if you didn't go:

AlamoSUG welcomes special guest Doug Strickland who will speak on NIS to LDAP Migration/Identity Management. All with interest in the topic and OpenSolaris are welcome to attend, enjoy food & beverage courtesy of ALAMOSUG sponsor SecureTek Group.

MEMBERSHIP DRIVE: We want to grow the opensolaris ALAMOSUG community! http://opensolaris.org/os/project/alamo-osug/events/ -- Everyone who brings a first time attendee will receive a gift. Member who brings the most first time attendees (minimum 3) will receive a Bose iPod Docking Station (Limit 1, if tie drawing). We encourage you to extend this invitation to others genuinely interested (or should be) in OpenSolaris. Everyone who attends will receive a cool prize. Bring 1 person and your prize will be cooler!

Agenda:

5:30 PM To 6:30 PM Meet & Greet Social

6:30 PM To 7:30 PM NIS to LDAP Migration/Identity Management

7:30 PM To 8:00 PM Q& A and Open Discussion

8:00 PM To 10:00 PM Let the Games Begin

*Where:* Dave & Busters (I10 and 410) 440 Crossroads Boulevard San Antonio, TX 78232