USENIX Update

Issues and Trends in Reliably Sanitizing Solid State Disks Michael Wei, University of California, San Diego Reliably erasing data from storage media (sanitizing the media) is a critical component of secure data management. While sanitizing entire disks and individual files is well understood for hard drives, flash-based solid state disks have a very different internal architecture. Our lab has evaluated the effectiveness of state-of-the-art sanitization on solid state disks (SSDs) and determined that it is unreliable and could lead to a false sense of security. This talk focuses on the issues and trends today in solid state disk sanitization.

The Operational Impact of Continuous Deployment Avleen Vig, Etsy, Inc. Continuous deployment has significant advantages for getting code changes into production with short turnaround times. We will go over the requirements of an operations group to support a continuous deployment environment. The impact of monitoring, escalations, capacity planning, and tools on the culture and workflow of operations teams will be discussed as we enter "The Continuous Deployment Zone."

GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction Jesse Robbins, Opscode, LLC

What Is Watson? Michael P. Perrone, Manager, Multicore Computing, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center The TV quiz show Jeopardy! is famous for giving contestants answers to which they must supply the correct questions. Contestants must be fast, with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the world and the ability to figure out clues that are vague, involve double meanings, and frequently rely on puns. Early this year, Jeopardy! aired a match involving the two all-time most successful Jeopardy! contestants and Watson, an artificial intelligence system designed by IBM. Watson won the Jeopardy! match by a wide margin. In doing so, it brought the leading edge of computer technology a little closer to human abilities. This presentation will describe the supercomputer implementation of Watson used for the Jeopardy! match and the challenges that had to be overcome to create a computer capable of accurately answering open-ended, natural-language questions in real time—typically in under 3 seconds.