Second Extreme Linux Research Topics Workshop planned for USENIX 1999 June 6-1

by Dwight Johnson

The Second Extreme Linux Research Topics Workshop will be held
in conjunction with USENIX 1999 (http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix99/)
from June 6-11, 1999 in Monterey, California. But don’t plan on
attending, unless you’ve already been invited.

Workshop Steering Committee member Matt Welsh writes:

At this time, we’re only soliciting papers and
talks from the list of invitees included in the announcement. The
reason for this is that our space at USENIX is *very* limited — we
only have about 140 chairs to fill. As such, rather than soliciting
papers from the public, we have drafted a list of potential
attendees and requested that they submit information to us. It’s
our hope that the majority of these invitees can either make a
presentation or at least attend the workshop.

After the initial round of invitations has gone through, we
expect to “open up” registration to the public to fill the
remaining chairs. This will go through the regular USENIX
registration channels. We also expect to have other
ExtremeLinux-related events at USENIX this year, including BoF
sessions, which everyone at USENIX can attend.

From the Workshop invitation:

Linux has already proven to be an essential
component in building clusters of PCs and is becoming increasingly
popular in the world of scientific and high-performance computing.
Several companies have products that address the high end of Linux
computing. Dozens of universities and laboratories are using
clusters of Linux boxes for scientific computation.

This meeting will focus on the research issues associated
with the use of Linux in high-performance and supercomputing
applications, including:

* Linux-based Workstation Clusters
* Wide-Area Supercomputing and Distributed Systems
* Filesystems, Device Drivers, and Kernel Support
* High-Performance Network Interfaces
* Message Passing and Distributed Shared Memory
* Applications
* Numerical Libraries
* Programming Language Support
* Graphics and Visualization
* Performance Analysis

We would like participants to submit short papers, from two
to five pages, in PostScript. They will be published in a printed
proceedings, and will be made available on-line at the Extreme
Linux web site (www.extremelinux.org).

Like the first workshop in Santa Fe, this meeting is a forum
for:

– Computer science research and development of Linux and
supporting software
– Software for scientific programming on Linux
– Industry support of Linux for high-performance computation
– Collaboration: organizing and developing our software
efforts

Below, you will find a list of the topics and people this
announcement is being sent to.

Panel:

Selling High Performance Linux: (experiences, concerns,
strategies, future)

Steve Gaudet: DCG computers

Glen Lowrey: Altatech

Glen Rowe: Compaq

Doug Eadline: Paralogic

Storage and File Systems:

Garth Gibson: Network attached devices for Linux

Peter Braam: CODA Journaling File System for
Linux

Matthew O’Keefe: Global File System for Linux

Walter B. Ligon III: Parallel Virtual File System for
Linux

Rajeev Thakur: MPI-IO for Linux

Fast Message Passing and Networking:

Tony Skjellum: MPI for Linux Clusters

Bob Felderman: Myrinet’s GM layer for Linux

Bill Saphir: M-VIA for Linux

Don Becker: Gigabit ethernet for Linux

Alan Cox: High-performance networking inside the Linux
kernel

Special Invited Talks (Looking into the future)

Tom Sterling: Far Out Computing: Petaflops

Ian Foster: The “Grid”

Greg Chesson: The future of scalable machines

Eric Brewer: Cluster power and complexity on the
Internet

Graphics:

Kai Li: Distributed Frame Buffer

Jamie Painter: 3-D volumetric rendering

Hank Dietz: The Aggregate power wall

Garry M. Paxinos: Metrolink’s support for high end Linux
graphics

Applications:

Bill Humphrey: LANL, Using a Linux Cluster for Linear
Accelerator Modeling

Darryl Strauss: Linux Supporting High-End
Rendering

System Administration of Large Clusters:

Marc Ewing / Robert Hart: RedHat Support of Extreme
Linux

Harald Milz : Linux High Availability

Ian Goldberg: Linux Security, etc.

Amnon Barak: Mosix

Tools:

Bill Nitzberg: PBS batch scheduling system

David Jackson: The Maui Scheduler for Linux

Andreas Zeller: DDD, The Data Display Debugger

Sameer Shende: Tracing and Profiling in Linux

Programming Environments:

Vince Schuster: SMP Compiler support and Extensions for
VIA

Greg Galanos: Metrowerks Code Warrior for Linux

Cheri Pancake: Ptools support for Linux

Richard Kaufman: Compaq’s support high-performance
programming

Yutaka Ishikawa: The RWCP cluster programming
environment

Experiences with Big Clusters:

Rolf Riesen: CPLANT

David Halstead: Ameslab Gplant

Henri Bal: Vrije Universitat cluster

Ralph Siemsen : Corel Netwinder Zaphod 10-pack

David Culler: UC Berkeley Millennium project

Organizing the Meeting:

Pete Beckman

“David S. Greenberg”

“Jon ‘maddog’ Hall”

Matt Welsh

This invitation, which originally appeared on February 4, 1999
on LWN/daily, was withdrawn at
the request of the Steering Committee.

When Linux Today told Steering Committee member Matt Welsh it
wanted to make an announcement anyway, he said:

If you do this I only ask that you make it clear
that this is *not* a general announcement — it is a private
invitation only to the people who are listed on the announcement.
We will be making a more general invitation soon, once we have the
list of speakers finalized.

Because of our space limitations the EL workshop will be
closed to general USENIX attendees. Rather, USENIX attendees will
have to register separately for the workshop…

I hasten to point out that this is not the only venue for
“Extreme Linux” work to be brought out; I believe there are other
events being planned, and USENIX this year is hosting a “Freenix”
track which solicits papers from anyone.

… We will have most of the seats filledeven before the
USENIX registration materials go out. We simply cannot accomodate
everyone, and regret that we may have to turn some people
away…

I have no idea what would happen if a large number of people
were to express interest in registering. You must realize that this
workshop has already undergone months of planning, and the space
has already been allocated and confirmed. This is not an ad hoc
event, nor is it a simple matter of rearranging rooms. We’re
talking about USENIX here!

… “Invite only” workshops are a routine occurrence in the
academic community.

Our future goals are to turn this into a “real conference”
with refereed papers and the like — that is of course preferable
to invite only. However, this would require resources and
sponsorship far beyond what we have available at this time. We hope
that this workshop will help Extreme Linux gain the prestige
necessary to turn this into a refereed conference
nextyear.

A large show of interest in the Second Extreme Linux Research
Topics Workshop might just speed the day when the “resources and
sponsorship” become available for a public and open conference
worthy of Linux and the other open-source technologies represented
at this workshop.