USENIX Update

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?

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Google NYC Tom will describe technologies and policies that Google uses to do what is (now) called DevOps. Google doesn't just empower developers and operations to work together; we have a system that empowers every group to be their own DevOps team.

Erik Kastner and John Goulah, Etsy, Inc. Developers deploy production code more than 30 times per day at Etsy. Small, rapid changes allow us to move fast, detect failure, and respond quickly. This works for a number of cultural and technical reasons. Learn about the tool we built, Deployinator, to automate this process and how we accomplish this effectively. We hope open-sourcing the tool will give people an opportunity to make their deployment process more agile and efficient.