A Blog

During June, I traveled to Arlington, VA, for the Teragrid 2009 conference for work. This is certainly an interesting conference. For those that don’t know, the Teragrid is “an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at eleven partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource.” In other words, a fairly big project put together by the NSF to create a national cyberinfrastructure to serve the needs of science.

I was part of the student program, which included 120 other high school, undergraduate, and graduate students from all around the nation. It was certainly interesting listening to the talks given by middle and high school educators about how they are trying to integrate computer simulation and visualization into the classroom.

During the conference, I mostly had two goals: listen to talks and present some of the work being done at Purdue. I had a small poster in the poster session about deploying Hadoop and how Purdue envisions using the Hadoop Distributed File System to support high throughput computing (which, I hear we’re known for doing quite well). Also, we had a small talk in the Education and Outreach Track about how Purdue is using the SC Cluster Challenge to support undergraduate exploration of High Performance Computing. Thankfully, both my little poster and the talk drew a lot of positive attention.

Sadly, the Teragrid conference seems very focused around talking about the science being done on the grid and not so much about the technologies that have been deployed and developed to make “the grid.” (Not to say the science isn’t important, just most of it is way over my head.) The best parts of the conference were finding other site admins to talk with and the poster session.

And, here’s a picture of the capital building from when we ventured away from the hotel on the last day: