USENIX Update

Phew! Those SCALE folks know how to put on a fabulous event!

A big THANKS to all the organizers, volunteers, exhibitors, and attendees for making SCALE10x the best one yet. Also, I’d like to thank everyone who stopped by the USENIX booth. I loved seeing so many familiar faces and old friends, and it’s always great to meet new people each year, too.

If you didn’t get a copy of ;login: before we ran out, be sure to check out some of the free articles we have posted online or learn more about benefits of joining USENIX and SAGE on our membership page.

Also, I wanted to thank everyone who contributed to, attended, or gave me feedback on my UpSCALE talk: 10 Ways to Anger Your Admin.

Hopefully we’ll see you at a USENIX conference or another event soon!

Are you thinking about submitting a paper for WebApps ’12? If so, get on it. Submissions are due January 23, 2012, 11:59 p.m. PST (hard deadline, no extensions, no exceptions, so don’t ask).

In this interview, WebApps ’12 program chair Michael Maximilien (IBM Research—Watson) offers a sneak peek at what we can expect to see this summer in Boston:

RE: We have some topic ideas listed for WebApps ’12. Which particular topics, products, services, or themes are most interesting to you or stand out this year?

MM: I think topics related to cloud computing and platform as a service (PaaS) as it relates to WebApps and their management might be an interesting topic. Also, WebApps with mobile views and techniques to create such apps are important topic for this year.

RE: Would you like to have anything new or different in the schedule for 2012?

MM: Yes, indeed. One of the main changes this year is the addition of “demo” papers. These are short papers — about half the size of regular papers — but that have an accompanying built system, application, etc., or in other words, a demo. The demo papers are designed to encourage industry and open source participants who might have interesting technology but are not used to the rigorous writing and review process for USENIX, or who simply do not have the time to write a full paper.

RE: Any sneak peeks or teasers yet for what we can expect at WebApps ’12?

MM: Yes, we have two confirmed distinguished keynotes already. One is the create of JSON, Doug Crockford from Yahoo!, and the other is a superstar in the open source world with significant contributions to Ruby, Rails, Merb, jQuery, and many others. I am talking about Yehuda Katz. We might have one more keynote — a surprise.

At FAST ’12, Brent Welch, director of software architecture at Panasas, will teach the Clustered and Parallel Storage System Technologies tutorial. Recently I interviewed Welch about the role Linux plays at Panasas and I asked him about skills that are most in-demand for HPC employers right now. You can read the interview on Linux Foundation’s site: Are Your Linux Skills Right for HPC Jobs?

Three other half-day tutorials are lined up for February 14:

Building a Cloud Storage System (Jeff Darcy, Red Hat)

Storage Class Memory: Technologies, Systems, and Applications (Rich Freitas and Larry Chiu, IBM Almaden Research Center)

Understanding the I/O of Columnar and NoSQL Database (Jiri Schindler, NetApp)

Beginning on Wednesday, February 15, the technical program includes 26 technical papers, Work-in-Progress reports (WiPs), and two poster sessions.

Students

Full-time students can attend technical sessions for only US$ 445.

Or, better yet, apply for a student grant. The deadline to apply is January 17, 2012.

Susan Landau, Visiting Scholar, Department of Computer Science, Harvard University The United States has moved large portions of business and commerce, including the control of critical infrastructure, onto IP-based networks. This reliance on information systems leaves the US highly exposed and vulnerable to cyberattack, yet US law enforcement remains focused on building wiretapping systems within communications infrastructure. By embedding eavesdropping mechanisms into communications technology itself, we build tools that could easily be turned against us. Indeed, such attacks have already occurred. In a world that has Al-Qaeda, nation-state economic espionage, and Hurricane Katrina, how do we get communications security right?