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Linuxfest Northwest 2004 Wrap-up
prostoalex writes "Linuxfest Northwest 2004 took place in Bellingham, WA this past Saturday, as announced on Slashdot before. Check out the ever-expanding photo album and what people are saying in their blogs. I also have an extensive and highly subjective write-up on my site, but I can only vouch for the events I've been to myself. Compare that to Linuxfest 2000 coverage to see how things have changed."
I never would have believed it if it hadn't happened to me. Yes indeed, the captions on the photo albums mentioned in the article are editable by anyone. Just changed the caption of one of the photos myself.
Have fun. Be good!
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Wouldn't it be nice if the full text of the lectures at such meetings were available to reporters and technical writers? A lot of authoritative Open-Source knowledge is presented at events like this and never becomes available to Joe public... at least with transcripts available we can get writers to _re-organize_ the information later on.
just a nigerian personal web publisher
Sure the event could have been held in a larger town and been another (yawn) commercial flop @200 a head to hear some schmuck talk about how he worked for Pixar (cough).
But grassroots and small town kept this thing fun and educational. There were some big names including Amazon, Sun, and the man Rasmus Lerdorf.
Suprisingly there were a lot of families there, and even children scurring about chewing on network cables and doing...kid things.
The event gets better each year while keeping it noncommericial and free. There were quite a few regional and local businesses there but no one was pushing except maybe that Rackspace guy who thought the fest was his private infomercial.
It was all pulled together by a bunch of volunteers including the gracious host (Bellingham Technical College).
All things considered I'm marking this down on my calendar for next year. Cause each year they take stock and make improvements. Do the same.
I thought LFNW was awesome. I especially enjoyed the Pacific Northwest National Labs High Performance Linux Cluster talk given by Timothy A Witteveen of PNL. It is one hell of a machine. It is one hell of a machine. 9.4 teraflops and a 53 terrabyte SAN running NWLinux. It placed 5th on the last Top 500 List.
That 53 terrabyte SAN is one contiguous filesystem using lustre. The use of QSNet2/Elan4 interconnects make the use of terbyte data sets with lots of internode communication more efficient than past machines. These interconnects provide a peak bandwidth of 340 MB/sec in each direction. But even more impresive than the bandwidth is the latency, between 2 us and 5 us. Compare that with ethernet latency measured in tens or even hundreds of ms.
During the presentation Tim went over two examples of simulations performed on their cluster that could not be accomplished on other machines. These examples were outside of my domain of knowledge, but one involved simulating the behavior of water molecules and the other was an extremely detailed protein folding simulation.
One last bit that was interesting was their methodology for updating the machines. They have over a thousand and took some time to determine an efficient means to keep the machines up to date. It was determined that reimaging the maches was faster than applying patches. They utilize a multicast approach in which allows them, theoretically, to reimage all of the machines in 28 minutes. They do not always reach this theoretical maximum, but they reimage a thousand machines PDQ.
The meet & greet in the commons was fun. Pogo Linux had a free drawing for a loaded AMD64 system. There was plenty of swag to be had from all sorts of folks. It was cool to stop and chat with one of the Helix developers. All in all there was a really good group of folks gathered.
I know Slashdot is full of trolls, but I must say I am a little suprised at how many crappy comments LFNW is getting. All I have to say to those filled with negativity is screw you. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have some cool stuff going on. Whether it is the 3 new lugs in Seattle, OSDL in Portland, the Linux Cluster at PNL, SeattleWireless, PersonalTelco or LFNW there are exciting things happening up here. I think a couple people on this site need to take their heads out of their arses and take a look around. Folks up here are using linux, and getting stuff done.
"DRM is like violence: if it doesn't work, use more."
One of the perks of LFNW this year was a swank after party thrown by the local Class A Data Center, FiberCloud. The party was a great opportunity to meet a diverse array of folks.
I got to go on a tour of the data center, and I was really impressed. They currently have two bandwidth providers(AT&T and a Canadian Provider). The fiber running north doesn't touch any electronics beforing reaching Canada. They will be adding Sprint and MCI through a connection with their Everet data center later this year or early this year. The engineering of the facility was impressive. Their was forsight and redundancy built in all over the freakin' place.
But what was more impressive was how profesional they were in combination with how service oriented. Because of the size and location of their facility I got a small buisness feel from them. You know that real friendly, know your going to get to talk to a human and they are going to help you out kind of feeling.
They raffled off a pretty darn nice colocation package at the party. I left before the raffle. I hope they have just been delayed in informing me of winning.
"DRM is like violence: if it doesn't work, use more."