Sun European Education & Research Conference – Day 3

The last at the Sun European Education & Research Conference was not as long as the other days. Although it was the last day of the conference, the meeting hall was full and it is not very usual in conferences like this which shows that people were still interested in listening. Kudos to the organizers !

First Speaker : Roger Keyse

Since he is the Manager xVM EMEA Global Practice, Roger told how PC sales are declining and “Desktop as a Service” is increasing. According to Roger, companies must use “virtualization” instead of managing a lot of PCs.

Regarding his strategy, he believes in “starting small and quickly” instead of trying to achieve the big from the start. Virtualization enables delivering the applications to anywhere you are.

Next Speaker: Carsten Thalheimer

Carsten is Solution Architect xVM. He explained Sun’s Desktop Virtualization Roadmap to the audience.

Gary Serda is talking about OSUM

Gary Serda (Marketing Manager, Government, Education, Healthcare, Sun Microsystems) is talking about OSUM and best practices at European education and research conference.

Alper Celik is talking about Open Source Networking Project

Alper Celik is talkin about Open Source Networking Project and how they converted a regular PC into a router at the very first day of European Education and Research Conference. Berlin 2009

Gokhan Dogan is talking about Sun SPOT Project

Gokhan Dogan is talking about their Sun SPOT project at first day of European Education & Research conference.

Sun European Education & Research Conference – Day 2

Another busy day at the Sun European Education & Research Conference in Berlin just finished and here is what happened today.It was Joe Hartley this time who welcomed everybody in the morning and called Marc Hamilton to the stage.

First Speaker : Marc Hamilton
Since he is the Vice President Systems US his speech was mainly about Data Intensive Scientific Computing. First he has talked about the built-in “cloud” feature in the new version of Open Office which is not available yet. So he actually downloaded his presentation from the cloud !

He presented some of Sun’s Super Computer Infrastructure like “Ultra Dense Blade Platform”, “Ultra Dense Switch Solution”,”Ultra-Dense Storage Solutions” and “Comprehensive Software Stack”. I really need to say he was great at the stage, one would feel the enthusiasm and the level of knowledge he has about his business.

Super Computers

Then he has given examples of some of the Super Computers that Sun has built like “Titech Tsubame Super Computer” in Japan and TACC Ranger Super Computer.

Sun HPC Leadership

Marc Hamilton mentioned that There are over 2.5 petaflops of backlogs now and TACC is the largest open compute cluster in the world and Intel is building chips using HDC.

Do Potato Chips Require HPC Too?

Indeed Yes! Marc explained how “Procter&Gamble” needed HPC to create those delicious “Pringles” as they have needed in consumer packaging of their detergents.

Saving Data Explosion

Then he told that Sun Lustre drives more than %50 of the Top 100 Super Computers and compared a conventional HDD with a solid state 2.5″ SSD. It turned out that although you pay more per mb, you pay less for a I/O operation.

Next Speaker : Dr. Helge Meinhard

Since Helge is the Technical Co-ordinator for Server Procurements, IT Dept CERN, he began his presentation by introducing CERN (European Lab. for Particle Physics). The crowd learned that it is developed by 20 E.U member states and run huge experiments.

After the introduction, he explained how they have done the “Large Hadron Collider” and the infrastructure needed to do this experiment. It turned out that one needs 3 million DVDs to store the data of this experiment.

After Helge’s presentation, there were 4 parallel breakout sessions and we have participated in “Transforming Educational Services:  Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” session.

Break Out Session:

The session started with Manuel Jaffrin’s part about the Web 2.0 business. He is the Europe Business Development Manager Web Industry Practice. He first introduced the Web 2.0 landscape by giving us some numbers and key factors.

He said that the new rules are governing the internet and data is capital for Web2.0 companies which has a “never ending beta” strategy. He mentioned that the Web2.0 Business Ecosystem is changing and it’s creating new industries as well as changing traditional industries.

Sharing is in our DNA

Since sharing is a very natural need for human being, people wants to share and Web2.0 is all about scaling. Manuel gave a very useful website called http://www.highscalability.com to see which website is using which underlying technology. You can watch Manuel Jaffrin interview on our blog as well.

Next Speaker : Constantin Gonzalez

After Manuel, the stage was Constantin’s who is Principal Field Technologist at Sun Microsystems. His talk was mainly about “cloud computing”. He explained how “cloud computing” lowers the costs and increases the “business agility” along with how economic it is.

Break Even Easier!

He gave the examples of two typical businesses to see the difference of the savings with the “cloud computing”. The first business didn’t facilitate cloud computing and had their “breakeven” after 18 months and 1.1 million members. On the other hand, the second business, had a “breakeven” point by 282.000 members in 18 months.

Features of Cloud Computing:

Some of the great features of cloud computing is the following:

• One service fits all
• Self provisioning
• Elasticity
• Pay Per Use
• Virtualized Physical Resources
• Programmatic Control

You can reach to him on Constantin Gonzalez blog.

Here are some pictures from the rest of the day:

Joe Hartly is making opening speech

Joe Hartley (Vice president – Government, Education & Research, Healthcare – Sun Microsystems) at European education and research conference first day, making his opening speech.

European Education and Research Conference, Berlin 2009

Morten Christoffer Hansen, (Head of Dept. for Software Exchange – Danish Public Sector under Ministry of Science) giving his recommendations to students.

Kaj Arnö, Vice President MySQL Community

Kaj Arnö, Vice President MySQL Community – MySQL Ambassador to Sun Microsystems starting to his presentation at European education and research conference. Berlin 2009

Joe Hartly

Joe Hartly (Vice President – Government, Education & Research, Healthcare) from Sun Microsystems is giving his recommendations to students at European education and research conference. Berlin, 2009

Marc Hamilton at the stage

March Hamilton (Vice President Systems Practice) is talking about High Performance Computing and giving recommendations to student at European education and research conference