Town & Country

Opening Remarks, Awards, Keynote

Session Chair: Mario Obejas, Raytheon
Live Streaming Available

Keynote Address
Implementing Intellipedia Within a "Need to Know" Culture

Sean Dennehy, Chief of Intellipedia Development, Directorate of Intelligence, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency

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Sean will share the technical and cultural changes underway at the CIA involving the adoption of wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking tools. In 2005, Dr. Calvin Andrus published The Wiki and The Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Three years later, a vibrant and rapidly growing community has transformed how the CIA aggregates, communicates, and organizes intelligence information. These tools are being used to improve information sharing across the U.S. intelligence community by moving information out of traditional channels.

REFEREED PAPERS

California

Think About It (Meta-Admin and Theory)

Session Chair: Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory

Designing Tools for System Administrators: An Empirical Test of the Integrated User Satisfaction Model
Nicole F. Velasquez, Suzanne Weisband, and Alexandra Durcikova, University of Arizona

Paper in HTML | PDF

Dynamic Dependencies and Performance Improvement
Marc Chiarini and Alva Couch, Tufts University

Paper in HTML | PDF

Automatic Software Fault Diagnosis by Exploiting Application Signatures
Xiaoning Ding, The Ohio State University; Hai Huang, Yaoping Ruan, and Anees Shaikh, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; Xiaodong Zhang, The Ohio State University

Paper in HTML | PDF

INVITED TALKS I

San Diego

Session Chair: Esther Filderman, University of Michigan
Live Streaming Available

Integrating Linux (and UNIX and Mac) Identity Management in Microsoft Active Directory
Mike Patnode, Centrify

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If you have a mixed environment, some of these might be on your must-do list: centralizing authentication, access control and policy management in Microsoft AD, using the Group Policy features of Active Directory for Linux management, delivering SSO to your users, and complying with government regulations. How can you pull it all off? We'll discuss the challenges, as well as explore the various options both in the public domain and from commercial providers and discuss their requirements and capabilities. The questions we'll answer include: Why would I want to integrate Linux with Active Directory? What are the issues (e.g., compatibility and maintenance, capabilities, integration, organizational impediments, cost)? What are the choices in terms of technology requirements and components?

INVITED TALKS II

Golden West

Session Chair: Kent Skaar, BMC Software, Inc.

Programming the Virtual Infrastructure
Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh

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With the use of virtualization, changes in a computing infrastructure no longer require physical intervention: the capacity of the virtual machines, their attached disks, and their network connections can all be changed by software. The challenges of configuring this infrastructure have some interesting analogies with the task of programming the first computers—and the whole new discipline of software engineering was needed to fully exploit their power. What does this mean for today's system administrator?

THE GURU IS IN

Royal Palm Salon 1/2

Managing Large (to Massive) Storage Systems
Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer Services

Jacob Farmer is a well-known figure in the data storage industry. He has written numerous papers and articles and is a regular speaker at trade shows and conferences. In addition to his regular expert advice column in the "Reader I/O" section of InfoStor Magazine, the leading trade magazine of the data storage industry, Jacob also serves as the publication's senior technical advisor. Jacob has over 18 years of experience with storage technologies and is the CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, a national integrator of data storage and data protection solutions.

REFEREED PAPERS

California

Large-ish Infrastructure

Session Chair: Derek Balling, Answers Corporation

Petascale System Management Experiences
Narayan Desai, Rick Bradshaw, Cory Lueninghoener, Andrew Cherry, Susan Coghlan, and William Scullin, Argonne National Laboratory

Paper in HTML | PDF

Rapid Parallel Systems Deployment: Techniques for Overnight Clustering
Donna Cumberland, Randy Herban, Rick Irvine, Michael Shuey, and Mathieu Luisier, Purdue University

Paper in HTML | PDF

ENAVis: Enterprise Network Activities Visualization
Qi Liao, Andrew Blaich, Aaron Striegel, and Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame

Paper in HTML | PDF

INVITED TALKS I

San Diego

Session Chair: Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting
Live Streaming Available

How to Proceed When 1000 Call Agents Tell You, "My Computer Is Slow": Creating a User Experience Monitoring System
Tobias Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG

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Once users have figured out that their computers are slow, there is an uphill battle to improve the performance and at the same time lose that slowness image. In this talk I will report on the development of a Perl-based system for passive application monitoring for a large Swiss telecom company. The system keeps track of hundreds of different performance metrics. Running on over 1,000 client workstations, several gigabytes of performance data are gathered each week and stored in a central PostgreSQL database. An Ajax-enabled Web application allows users to explore, compare, and investigate performance data. Hear how investigating performance problems has turned from random guesswork into a clearly defined process, based on objective measurements rather than rumors.

INVITED TALKS II

Golden West

Session Chair: Chris McEniry, Sony Computer Entertainment America

How to Stop Hating MySQL: Fixing Common Mistakes and Myths
Sheeri K. Cabral, The Pythian Group

Watch the video online at http://technocation.org/node/646/play/.

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If you find yourself muttering "MySQL is awful," you cannot miss this session. Many common-sense approaches backfire when applied to schemas and queries in MySQL. Sheeri K. Cabral of The Pythian Group will explain why that happens and how to think about designing, tuning, and optimizing MySQL, so you can save your hate for more important things, such as vi vs. emacs discussions. There will be plenty of time, so feel free to ask any questions, particularly about query and schema optimization (actual or in the abstract).

THE GURU IS IN

Royal Palm Salon 1/2

Spam Fighting
Chris St. Pierre, Nebraska Wesleyan University

Chris St. Pierre is the system administrator at Nebraska Wesleyan University, a small but growing liberal arts university. In his four years there, he has led a charge to document and modernize the computing infrastructure. He has taught spam filtering and internal documentation and has considerable experience and interest in issues of scalability, business continuity, and automation. Chris enjoys fighting spam in his spare time.

REFEREED PAPERS

California

Trust and Other Security Matters

Session Chair: Æleen Frisch, Exponential Consulting

Fast, Cheap, and in Control: Towards Pain-Free Security!
Sandeep Bhatt, Cat Okita, and Prasad Rao, Hewlett-Packard

Paper in HTML | PDF

Concord: A Secure Mobile Data Authorization Framework for Regulatory Compliance
Gautam Singaraju and Brent Hoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Paper in HTML | PDF

Authentication on Untrusted Remote Hosts with Public-Key Sudo
Matthew Burnside, Mack Lu, and Angelos Keromytis, Columbia University

Paper in HTML | PDF

INVITED TALKS I

San Diego

Session Chair: Derek Balling, Answers Corporation
Live Streaming Available

Does Your House Have Lions? Controlling for the Risk from Trusted Insiders
Marcel Simon, Medco Health Solutions

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How do you control for risk from trusted insiders? The nature of the job that system/network/database administrators, application developers, operations center staff, etc., do pretty much requires them to have privileged access to your infrastructure. That very privilege means rogues among such individuals can both do great damage and cover their tracks, so how do you protect your information? This talk proposes a practical, technology-neutral approach to trusted insider controls that adapts readily to your business practices and has proven itself over years of production usage.

INVITED TALKS II

Golden West

Session Chair: David Parter, University of Wisconsin

Spine: Automating Systems Configuration and Management
Rafi Khardalian, Ticketmaster

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Spine is Ticketmaster's in-house configuration management system, which was recently released to the community via GPL. Spine contributes significantly to our ability to manage 4,000+ globally distributed systems with a relatively small team of system administrators. This talk will focus on the tools and methods used to achieve this.

Many conventional systems provisioning tools involve the use of images and do not deal with sustained management. We, however, rely on OS-supplied provisioning tools to perform the initial bootstrap, after which Spine is deployed and used to apply system-specific configuration. We use Spine for the day-to-day management of our infrastructure, including the rollout of new applications and validating/enforcing the consistency of a given configuration across an essentially infinite number of instances.

THE GURU IS IN

Royal Palm Salon 1/2

MySQL and PostgreSQL
Sheeri K. Cabral, The Pythian Group; Richard Broersma, Jr., PostgreSQL Project; Dan Langille, Afilias USA, Inc.

The Gurus for both topics will be available for the entire session, answering questions in a "how does this database approach this issue versus that database" style.

Sheeri K. Cabral has a master's degree in computer science specializing in databases from Brandeis University. She has background as a systems administrator. Cabral is a MySQL expert and has also worked with Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Solaris, Red Hat/Fedora, AIX, and HP-UX. Unstoppable as a volunteer and activist since age 14, Cabral founded and organizes the Boston, Massachusetts, USA, MySQL user group, and the not-for-profit www.technocation.org to help IT professionals. She won the MySQL Community Advocate of the Year Award in 2007 and 2008. Cabral currently works as a MySQL DBA for The Pythian Group in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Richard Broersma, Jr., is the head of the Los Angeles PostgreSQL Users Group and develops industrial applications on PostgreSQL for Mangan Inc.

Dan Langille is a database administrator for Afilias USA, Inc., which processes millions of transactions per day on PostgreSQL. He has been heavily involved with several open source projects since 1998. The founder of several Web sites and a couple of conferences, he tends to spend much of his spare time mountain biking. He's been fighting spam since shortly after setting up his first mail server back in 1998.

Town & Country

Plenary Session

Session Chair: Mario Obejas, Raytheon
Live Streaming Available

Reconceptualizing Security
Bruce Schneier, Chief Security Technology Officer, BT

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Security is both a feeling and a reality. You can feel secure without actually being secure and you can be secure even though you don't feel secure. We tend to discount the feeling in favor of the reality, but they're both important. The divergence between the two explains why we have so much security theater and why so many smart security solutions go unimplemented. Several different fields—behavioral economics, the psychology of decision-making, evolutionary biology—shed light on how we perceive security, risk, and cost. It's only when the feeling and the reality of security converge that we have real security.

REFEREED PAPERS

California

Virtualization

Session Chair: Chris McEniry, Sony Computer Entertainment America
Live Streaming Available

STORM: Simple Tool for Resource Management
Mark Dehus and Dirk Grunwald, University of Colorado, Boulder

Paper in HTML | PDF

IZO: Applications of Large-Window Compression to Virtual Machine Management
Mark A. Smith, Jan Pieper, Daniel Gruhl, and Lucas Villa Real, IBM Almaden Research Center

Paper in HTML | PDF

Portable Desktop Applications Based on P2P Transportation and Virtualization
Youhui Zhang, Xiaoling Wang, and Liang Hong, Tsinghua University

Paper in HTML | PDF

INVITED TALKS I

San Diego

Session Chair: Philip Kizer, Tekelec

Mac OS X: From the Server Room to Your Pocket
Jordan Hubbard, Director, UNIX Technology Group, Apple, Inc.

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This talk will cover the evolution of Mac OS X and its deployment on everything from large servers to embedded platforms. Hardware trends and some of the challenges they present for Apple and the industry as a whole, as well as some of the challenges facing UNIX, will be discussed.

INVITED TALKS II

Golden West

Session Chair: Rudi van Drunen, Competa IT/Xlexit

An Open Audit of an Open Certification Authority
Ian Grigg, CAcert

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How does a lightweight community Certificate Authority ("CA") engage in the heavyweight world of PKI and secure browsing? With the introduction of Public Key Infrastructure, the Internet security framework rapidly became too complex for individuals and small groups to deal with, and the audit stepped into the gulf to provide a kinder face, in the form of a simple opinion or judgment call. This talk tracks the systems audit of CAcert, an open-membership CA, as a case study in auditing versus the open Internet, community versus professionalism, quality versus enthusiasm. It will look at how CAcert found itself at this point and then will walk through some big-ticket items, such as risks, assurance, disputes, privacy, and security. Can CAcert deliver on its goal of free certs?

THE GURU IS IN

Royal Palm Salon 1/2

VMware
Richard McDougall, John Y. Arrasjid, and Shridhar Deuskar,VMware

Richard McDougall is a Principal Engineer and the Chief Performance Architect in the Office of the CTO at VMware. A recognized expert in operating systems, virtualization, performance, resource management, and filesystem technologies, Richard is a frequent speaker and has published several papers and books on these topics. Prior to VMware, most recently he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he wrote the authoritative books Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance and Tools.

John Arrasjid has 20 years of experience in the computer science field. His experience includes work with companies such as AT&T, Amdahl, 3Dfx Interactive, Kubota Graphics, Roxio, and his own company, WebNexus Communications, where he developed consulting practices and built a cross-platform IT team. John is currently a senior member of the VMware Professional Services Organization as a Consulting Architect. John has developed a number of PSO engagements, including Performance, Security, and Disaster Recovery and Backup. John is the Worldwide BC/DR Practice lead in VMware's Professional Services group. He is a co-author of the SAGE Short Topics booklet Deploying the VMware Infrastructure.

Shridhar Deuskar is an experienced professional in the IT industry. He has over 10 years of experience in system administration of UNIX and Windows servers. He has consulted with companies such as Caterpillar, HP, and EMC. Currently he is a Consulting Architect in VMwares Professional Services organization and is responsible for delivering services tied to virtualization to clients worldwide.

REFEREED PAPERS

California

On the Wire

Session Chair: Brent Hoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Live Streaming Available

Topnet: A Network-aware top(1)
Antonis Theocharides, Demetres Antoniades, Michalis Polychronakis, Elias Athanasopoulos, and Evangelos P. Markatos, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology (ICI-FORTH), Hellas, Greece

Paper in HTML | PDF

Fast Packet Classification for Snort by Native Compilation of Rules
Alok Tongaonkar, Sreenaath Vasudevan, and R. Sekar, Stony Brook University

Paper in HTML | PDF

INVITED TALKS I

San Diego

Session Chair: Philip Kizer, Tekelec

OpenSolaris and the Direction of Future Operating Systems
James Hughes, Sun Microsystems

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This presentation will discuss the currently available OpenSolaris distribution, which is based on Solaris and provides a new installation, patch, and package system. It offers improved familiarity for developers coming from a Linux environment, with the goal of providing a capable platform for creating applications. Computing requirements are changing and future operating systems (not just OpenSolaris) will have to be capable of handling large memory, high hardware thread counts, and high-performance networking, while adding security, scalable storage management, and virtualization and making new classes of large-scale applications possible.

INVITED TALKS II

Golden West

Session Chair: Rudi van Drunen, Competa IT/Xlexit

Auditing UNIX File Systems
Raphael Reich, Varonis

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Lack of visibility into UNIX file share data use and poor access control have been a reality since the inception of UNIX almost 40 years ago. Today, data governance initiatives are providing companies with the framework and means to obtain a consistent, enterprise-wide view of their data, to improve data security, to create a continuous audit trail, and to take significant steps toward compliance and risk reduction. Join Raphael Reich for an insightful session that will provide information on how technologies that actualize the tenets of data governance can simplify the process of auditing UNIX file systems and prevent the misuse of an organization's confidential data. We will also discuss the importance of managing access controls and how to integrate a comprehensive data governance framework into the UNIX environment.

THE GURU IS IN

Royal Palm Salon 1/2

Time Management
Tom Limoncelli, Google NYC

Tom is an internationally recognized author and speaker. His books include the new second edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley), Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly), and The Complete April Fools' RFCs (Peer-To-Peer). Tom works for Google in NYC. He is the joint recipient of SAGE's 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He blogs at www.EverythingSysadmin.com.

REFEREED PAPERS

California

Getting Stuff Done

Session Chair: Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh

Sysman: A Virtual File System for Managing Clusters
Mohammad Banikazemi, David Daly, and Bulent Abali, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Paper in HTML | PDF

Devolved Management of Distributed Infrastructures with Quattor
Stephen Childs, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; Marco Emilio Poleggi, INFN-CNAF, Bologna, Italy; Charles Loomis, Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire (LAL), Orsay, France; Luis Fernando Muñoz Mejías, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain; Michel Jouvin, Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire (LAL), Orsay, France; Ronald Starink, Nikhef, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Stijn De Weirdt, Universiteit Gent, Ghent, Belgium; Germán Cancio Meliá, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland

Paper in HTML | PDF

Authorisation and Delegation in the Machination Configuration System
Colin Higgs, University of Edinburgh

Paper in HTML | PDF

INVITED TALKS I

San Diego

Session Chair: Travis Campbell, AMD
Live Streaming Available

WTFM: Documentation and the System Administrator
Janice Gelb, Sun Microsystems

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Additional Materials

Most system administrators fear and hate documentation, both writing and reading it. This presentation attempts to alleviate that frustration by explaining why system administration documentation is important, showing how to resolve common documentation problem areas using real-world examples, and describing how to improve product documentation from your company and from companies that make products you use.

INVITED TALKS II

Golden West

Session Chair: Brent Hoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Fighting Spam with pf
Dan Langille, Afilias USA, Inc.

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Spam is a problem for any mail administrator. Dealing with spam consumes time, bandwidth, and disk space. This talk will introduce pf and show you how it can be used to greatly reduce the spam that gets to your mail server. pf will both reduce the load on your mail server and reduce the amount of spam received. This solution will work with any mail server and requires no changes to your existing mail server configuration.

THE GURU IS IN

Royal Palm Salon 1/2

Solaris Fault Management
4:00 p.m.–4:45 p.m.
Scott Davenport and Louis Tsien, Sun Microsystems, Fault Management Development Team

Scott has been at Sun Microsystems for the past 10 years, the last 4–5 of which have been focused on developing fault management and diagnosis software for SPARC systems ranging from the E25K to the ultraSPARC-T2/T2 Plus CMT platforms. He is presently working on methodologies to deliver base-level support for FMA in sun4v platforms without necessitating Solaris changes. He is also exploring mechanisms to construct FM topology on x86/x64 systems in a common, resuable manner. Scott is a leader in the OpenSolaris FM community and blogs reasonably often at http://blogs.sun.com/sdaven. Earlier in his Sun career, Scott was a technical support engineer for the E10K/E25K product line. Prior to Sun, Scott was a system/network/
database administrator running an SAP/Informix datacenter.

Louis has been at Sun Microsystems for 8 years, developing CPU/memory diagnosis algorithms for SPARC processors since 2005. Prior to Sun, Louis worked at HP, Apollo, Prime, Polaroid, and several smaller companies, in development, support, quality assurance, marketing, and program management roles; he holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees from MIT and an MBA from Northeastern University.

ZFS
4:45 p.m.–5:30 p.m.
Richard Elling, Sun Microsystems, ZFS

Richard Elling is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he works to improve system-level reliability, availability, and serviceability. Prior to Sun, he was the network manager for the Auburn University College of Engineering, where he implemented a large-scale, ubiquitous networked computer environment and authored a paper for LISA. After joining Sun, he was the Worldwide Systems Engineer of the Year in 1996. He has authored several Sun BluePrints articles and a book on Designing Enterprise Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0. He is currently working on tools and techniques to help systems architects and integrators to design and build better systems.

Town & Country

Plenary Session

Session Chair: Mario Obejas, Raytheon
Live Streaming Available

The State of Electronic Voting, 2008
David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley

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As electronic voting has seen a surge in growth in the U.S. in recent years, controversy has swirled. Are these systems trustworthy? Can we rely upon them to count our votes? In this talk, I will discuss what is known and what isn't. I will survey some of the most important developments and analyses of voting systems, including the groundbreaking top-to-bottom review commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen last year. I will take stock of where we stand today, the outlook for the future, and the role that technologists can play in improving elections.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS REPORTS (WIPS)

California

Session Chairs: Brent Hoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Gautam Singaraju, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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The Work-in-Progress reports (WiPs) session offers short presentations about research in progress, new results, or timely topics.

INVITED TALKS I

San Diego

Session Chair: Travis Campbell, AMD
Live Streaming Available

Deterministic System Administration
Andrew Hume, AT&T Labs—Research

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The vision is clear and seductive: take a modest-sized specification of a computing environment and automatically derive all the stuff you actually need, from DHCP configurations to ordering cables. Is it possible to account for every box, every cable, every RAID box, every volume mounted, every OS deployed? I describe an attempt to do so, fighting the forces of Chaos and Nature, armed only with logical positivism, Ruby, little languages, and sarcasm.

INVITED TALKS II

Golden West

Session Chair: Rudi van Drunen, Competa IT/Xlexit

Designing, Building, and Populating a 10-Megawatt Datacenter
Doug Hughes, D.E. Shaw Research, LLC

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10MW isn't anywhere close to the giant datacenters of Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, but they usually have large teams of people at multiple locations and often none of them are sysadmins. This talk will give you the system administrator's perspective, since I was heavily involved in many phases of the design, evaluation, and build process. We'll talk about compute density, things that inhibit it, cooling, power and power distribution, machine planning, and supporting large and dynamic HPC clusters. How many kW can you fit in a rack? Just because you can, should you? What sorts of redundancy should you build in? How do you talk to site electricians? We've looked at these questions and more, arriving at some conclusions that could help you.

THE GURU IS IN

Royal Palm Salon 1/2

AFS
11:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m.
Esther Filderman, University of Michigan

Moose (Esther Filderman) has been working with AFS since before it was called AFS. She enjoys preaching and teaching about AFS and has been bringing AFS content to LISA for many years.

Configuration Management
11:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Luke Kanies, Reductive Labs

Luke has been publishing and speaking on his work in UNIX administration since 1997. He has focused on tool development since 2001, developing and publishing multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributing to established products such as Cfengine. He founded Reductive Labs in 2005 as a response to the stagnation in sysadmin tools, to be a vehicle for changing the way we interact with and manage our computers. He is currently focused on Puppet, an open-source automation framework written in Ruby, and he is always researching and developing new ways to make it easier to talk to computers on your terms. He has published and presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in.

San Diego

Lunchtime Talk

You're welcome to pick up lunch and bring it to the talk.

"Standard Deviations" of the "Average" System Administrator
Alva L. Couch, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Tufts University

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The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them from which to choose. System administrators often function according to "personal standards" that are in fact not standards at all. By comparison, electricians and plumbers adhere to strict quality standards that are externally verifiable. Compliance with standards (and a way to certify compliance) goes beyond certifying the administrator to certifying each site for compliance. Should there be standards for system administration? What current standards are there? Are they relevant? What might future standards look like? What would be the costs and would they be worth the trouble? I will discuss potential answers to these questions and solicit alternative views from the audience. I will explain why I believe that if we are to be respected as a guild of craftspeople, we must learn—like electricians and plumbers—to utilize standards strategically and effectively to uplift the profession and encourage respect for its practitioners.

INVITED TALKS I

San Diego

Session Chair: Philip Kizer, Tekelec
Live Streaming Available

System Administration and the Economics of Plenty
Tom Limoncelli, Google NYC

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Over the years IT resources (disk space, CPU, bandwidth) have gone from being scarce to being nearly infinitely plentiful. Why do our IT policies still reflect the days of scarcity? Seeing the world in terms of "the economics of plenty" brings about a paradigm shift that changes the way we treat our users, manage our systems, and take care of ourselves. Tom will discuss how this change in thinking can improve IT policies and practices and will present his thoughts on why the open source movement depends on this paradigm shift.

INVITED TALKS II

Golden West

Session Chair: Chris McEniry, Sony Computer Entertainment America

Inside DreamWorks Animation Studios: A Look at Past, Present, and Future Challenges
Sean Kamath and Mike Cutler, PDI/DreamWorks

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This talk will share some insights into the DreamWorks Animation Studios, starting with a short history. We'll explore the challenges of balancing custom work-flow expectations, HPC compute requirements, the "10 billion files" dilemma, and bending the rules of physics and latency, all without losing our artistic roots. We'll explain what we've done to make technology—advanced and traditional—invisible in a workplace filled with scientists whose right brains are bigger than their left, and what it's like to run over 2,000 Linux desktops being used by artists on a full-time basis. We will engage the audience in a debate on the merits of globalized computing, very high density computing, and storage clusters, suggesting new ideas about how to overcome these barriers.

INVITED TALKS III

California

Session Chair: Brent Hoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Beyond VDI: Why Thin Client Computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Aren't Cutting It
Monica Lam, MokaFive and Stanford University

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The advent of thin client computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) revitalized computing by enabling applications, remote desktops, and even virtual machines to be run on centralized servers in a datacenter. Wracked by performance, cost, and delivery issues, however, neither approach is cut out to solve the problem of managing multiple desktops within an organization. Come hear about the rise of a streamed virtual desktop approach that allows IT departments to manage and deploy secure desktops that run across multiple hardware and operating systems while working online or offline.

THE GURU IS IN

Royal Palm Salon 1/2

MacOS X
Jordan Hubbard, Director, UNIX Technology Group, Apple, Inc.

Jordan Hubbard is an engineering director for Apple, Inc., working on a number of UNIX technologies in Mac OS X. Mac OS X also uses a good deal of code from the FreeBSD Project, for which he is also one of the founders and past core team member.

Town & Country

Closing Session

LISA Quiz Show
Jeremy Allison, Google

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The LISA Quiz Show is back! Closing this year's conference, the LISA Quiz Show will pit teams of attendees against each other in a test of technical knowledge and cultural trivia. This year Jeremy Allison will bring his acclaimed game show hosting skills to the table, assuring a LISA Quiz Show unlike any other. Don't miss it!