[PLUG] Report on OSCON 2014

Bill Kielhorn kielhorn at amerimailbox.com
Sun Jul 27 23:55:31 UTC 2014


Report on OSCON 2014

I attended two and one-half days of the OSCON-2014 conference after 
being selected as winner of PLUG's book review contest.  Thanks to 
O'Reilly Books for sponsoring the ticket and thanks to Michael Dexter 
for organizing the contest.

I made full use of the ticket by attending events in each time slot 
allowed by the ticket.  That included three plenary talks, and 15 
session talks as well as lunch and access to the exhibit hall.  It was 
at times hard to decide which session talk to attend because there were 
typically 18 distinct choices in each time slot.  For the most part I 
attended talks about Functional Programming since I wanted to learn more 
about it and quite a few of the talks concerned the subject.

I saw talks about  functional languages Haskel, Clojure, and Erlang, as 
well as general talks about functional programming.  The main advantages 
over the more usual imperative style of programing are: 1) Fewer lines 
of code with consequent improvement in correctness. 2) Lazy evaluation 
for improved efficiency.  3) Robust out-of-order execution with 
simplified multi-threading.  Nevertheless, imperative style usually wins 
in speed contests.

My feeling was that the technical level of the talks was rather low and 
I was not alone in the feeling.  Several people I met said they would 
not return and one company CEO said he would withdraw his sponsorship 
because of this.  The high ticket cost was also a factor.  Nevertheless, 
for me OSCON was useful as a way to pick up on the current trends and 
interests in open source and software development.

By far, and unexpectedly, the best talk I heard was by CERN's IT 
manager.  CERN is the European particle physics laboratory that recently 
identified the first Higg's boson.  The lab's data management task is 
enormous.  They currently have 100 PetaBytes of legacy data in various 
formats that must be maintained and be accessible for the next 20 
years.  In addition the current rate of new data acquisition is 35 
Petabytes per year.  (One Petabyte is one million Gigabytes.)

To avoid being overwhelmed they decided to go to open source.  They now 
hire open source people, they use open source products, and they 
contribute code to open source.  They have virtualized their system, 
they use OpenStack, Puppet, Ceph, and other open source products. In 
twelve months time, Puppet will be managing 100,000 cores in their system!

Personally I know very little about any of the products used by CERN, 
but the interesting thing to me is that open source was the only 
available solution to their problem!  They are not using open source to 
be nice or to give back. They are using open source because it is the 
only way forward!  Moreover, it is working!  Open source is solving 
their problem!

Thanks again to O'Reilly and to Michael, and I will be happy to discuss 
OSCON further at the next PLUG meeting.

Bill Kielhorn




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