So on day three there were basically some big general sessions in the morning that I went and attended…
Session 1: Doing More with Less: The Future of Digital Preservation in a Constrained Fiscal Environment
An interesting talk from Laura Campbell, the CIO of the Library of Congress. What I wonder about this was whether this is a possible use for the NLR/FLR networks in regards to transmitting data from regional libraries to the Library of Congress. They have a website: (digitalpreservation.gov). I also wonder whether or not I should talk to Ben about this a bit.
Session 2: The Greening of IT at Marriott
One of the things that I took away from this was a question on whether or not using SSD drives in place of normal harddrives in a cluster would benefit in the long run from power savings. Obviously speed would be helped quite a bit, but would the power savings be worth it? Since we don’t pay for power ourselves, it is a bit of a moot point, but perhaps the University as a whole would be interested in paying the difference in cost in order to create a power savings.
Session 3: Next Generation Information Infrastructure
Some more musings about SSD drives during this lecture. Also, a fact that popped up is that data growth is approximately 57% a year, which is really huge.
Session 4: The Greening of the Data Center
As can be seen, a major focus of this years conference was on green computing. The only thing that really popped up to my attention was the concept of a MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks).
Session 5: Transform Your Data Center: The Path to a Transparent Infrastructure
I didn’t really get anything out of this, but as my mind wandered I mused on how the University would know just how much power our group is using at any given time if they decided to start charging the different groups around campus for power. There aren’t really any meters around that measure this sort of thing, so if they went to this kind of format, would each group have to pay for a meter or something?
Also, is there something that allows for NFS on an ESX server?
Session 6: NERSC – Extreme Storage and Computation for Science
While this talk was interesting for me, I noticed that there was a large exodus of people in the audience as the talk progressed. I figure this happened mainly because the talk given by William Kramer of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center was not focused properly for the group that was there. It gave a description of what the center was doing without really going into how they were using the technology or how it could benefit the attendees. In addition, the slides that William was using were very dense and had entirely too much information on them, something that academics seem to be consistently guilty of. While the slides may be useful to a select few, most of the information on them is useless for the folks in that audience.
The rest of the day I spent in the showroom learning more about what was available. I left around dinner time and found an Indian restaurant near Downtown Disney that was quite enjoyable.