The Internet is in the middle of yet another revolution, the advancement of the Semantic Web: a large, sprawling, contradictory, confusing set of tools, standards, ad hoc implementations, and sometimes warm attitudes. For about the first half, I’ll talk about the Semantic Web in general, emphasizing its main goal: to let software communicate better with other software, in service of the user. The “meaning” in “semantic” applies to machine understanding! Surprise!
Speaker Description:
Oz DiGennaro has been active in software and hardware development for thirty years, and has experienced the computer revolution first-hand. His work has included computer graphics, speech recognition, factory automation, image processing, printers, telecom, RFID, and web services for malaria control.
In addition to being an accomplished software developer, Oz has been an avid participant in the advance of the Internet. Oz worked with UNIX (version 1.0) on DEC PDP-11 using the newly-invented (and very strange language) called “C”, in 1979. He encountered the new “object-oriented methodology” in the early 1980’s; and he experienced email and “www” browsing in the early 1990’s.
Startup Experience
In the early 1980’s Oz was software manager at Verbex, owned by Exxon Enterprises. This was a division of Exxon that today we would call “venture capital”. The software developed at Verbex, after many re-incarnations appears as Dragon Systems today.
As CTO, Oz has run a startup doing customization and integration of high-end image processing systems (Signum Inc.).
In engineering management, Oz worked with an RFID startup from its “garage” stage (five employees working in 500 square feet) to receiving $18M from VC organizations (Skyetek).
Recently Oz served as CTO of Volkscast, an HD video acquisition and distribution startup out of New York City.
Now, Oz is Founder and CTO of Galgal Systems developing a suite of website enhancement tools: “4Dtext”.
Website for one of the best commercial ontology editing tools. Free trial period for everything. A limited free version forever. Useful and good for the beginner.
Recently, EOL has been examining its current software development processes and has started to develop recommendations and guidelines for software development. First, we will present the principles that shaped the guidelines and the purpose of the guidelines. Next, we will describe some of the practices that are already commonly used in EOL. Finally, we will describe some of the software practices that EOL plans to introduce.
Speaker Description:
John Allison joined UCAR/NCAR as a student assistant in 1992
and is currently a software engineer at EOL.
He has worked on a variety of applications from number crunching
to GUIs to web and is currently involved in major revisions of the
metadata stores and web applications for the EOL data archive.
Joe VanAndel graduated from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI with a double major of mathematics and physics in 1978. He earned his master's degree in computer science at University of California at Berkeley in 1980. Joe worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Westminster, CO on a real-time operating system called Oryx/Pecos. His next job was with Cadnetix, where he worked on porting Unix to proprietary workstations and servers, computer aided design tools, and software configuration management. In 1988, Joe started working at NCAR/EOL. His initial job was to lead a software team that transformed a prototype radar into a research testbed that served the FAA and the National Weather Service. Since this project, Joe has mostly worked on remote sensing with radars and lidars. He also worked on Driftsonde - a stratospheric balloon system that drops sondes from 90,000 feet in remote areas of the planet.
Chet Ramey has been working on large Free Software projects since 1989. In
that time, he has encountered and overcome many novel software engineering
issues and problems. This talk will cover twenty years of Bash and
Readline development, concentrating on the engineering aspects of creating
and distributing widely-used free software. It's a behind- the-scenes look
at the somewhat unorthodox way Bash and Readline are produced.
Speaker Description:
Chet Ramey is a longtime employee of Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio, from which he received a B.S. in Computer Engineering
and an M.S. in Computer Science. He's currently the Assistant Director
of Technology Infrastructure Services and manages the Network Engineering
and Operations groups. He has been working with Bash since 1989, and
had sole development and maintenance responsibility for Bash and Readline
since 1993.
As HPC systems have grown in size and complexity, monitoring of these
systems hasn't kept pace. Current systems either don't scale or are the
wrong fit, some systems are comprised of scripts systems administrators
have migrated from machine to machine. Attempts to select a monitoring
solution are further complicated by requirements for sharing data across
administrative boundaries and existing monitoring systems. The current
state of monitoring HPC resources will be discussed along with the
motivations for finding new solutions. Ongoing experiments involving
Speaker Description:
Michael Lowe received a BS from Purdue's School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering with a focus on chip and embedded design. He has
been employed for the past five years as a systems administrator at
Indiana University. Prior experience includes a four year term as a
network administrator at a Fortune 500 company.
Since the 1980’s, the Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) here at NCAR has been performing work for the FAA in the area of nowcasting and forecasting hazardous weather that affects aviation. Along these lines RAL has collaborated both with Lincoln Labs and NOAA in creating real-time systems that provide hazardous weather products to FAA controllers, airline dispatch, pilots and weather forecasters.
Speaker Description:
Gerry Wiener has been a software engineer at NCAR since 1987. He is currently the engineering deputy under Bill Mahoney in the Weather Systems and Assessment Program at RAL. He has worked on a variety of projects including FAA wind shear/microbursts, FAA turbulence, FAA ceiling and visibility, Hong Kong wind shear and turbulence, wind forecasting for renewable energy and road weather.
The mythology around Google Test runs like a ghostly spirit through the larger software quality community. Google automates everything. Google's cloud is the ultimate tester playground. Sometimes myth is larger than reality and sometime the reverse is true. In
this talk James Whittaker will dispel some Google Test myths and reinforce others. There is indeed a secret sauce we mix into our product quality efforts and many of its flavors can be sampled in this short presentation.
Speaker Description:
James A. Whittaker joined Google in May 2009 as a Test Engineering Director where he oversees the testing of Chrome browser, Chrome operating system and a bevy of other products. Formerly an Architect with Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System, he directed product strategy for Microsoft’s test business and led internal teams in the application of exploratory testing. Dr. Whittaker previously served as Professor of Computer Science at Florida Tech. There, he was named a Top Scholar by The Journal of Systems and Software, and led a
research team that created many leading-edge testing tools and technologies, including the acclaimed runtime fault injection tool Holodeck. Whittaker is author of Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours and Techniques to Guide Test Designand How to
Break Software. He is coauthor (with Hugh Thompson) of How to Break Software Security, co-author (with Mike Andrews) of How to Break Web Software and author of 50+ peer-reviewed papers on software development and security, and the holder of patents on various
inventions in security testing and defensive security techniques. Dr. Whittaker has a PhD in computer science from the University of Tennessee.
After an overview of the Intel Software Tools suite, this talk will focus on the current and some of the planned features of Intel compilers for the multi- and many-core Intel Architecture.
Speaker Description:
Dr. Pad Iyer has been active in the field of High Performance Computing for more than two decades. At Intel, his current activities center around communicating the value of the Intel Architecture in HPC. Prior to joining Intel he has held various research and project leadership positions in the area of High Performance Computing at Linux Network and Chevron. He holds a Ph.D in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University and started his career in the faculty of the Engineering School at Princeton University.
Modern graphics processing units offer enticing speedups for atmospheric modeling. However, accelerating large and complex models using GPUs is not a straightforward task. To explore the potential for using GPUs to accelerate an atmospheric model, I ported an expensive portion of the CAM radiation code to an Nvidia GPU. I will talk about performance that can be achieved for this test case, what it means in the context of a full model, current limitations to using GPUs, and future trends and technologies that will help overcome these limitations.
Speaker Description:
Rory C. Kelly is a Software Engineer in the Consulting Services Group. While studying physics at the University of Colorado, he accidentally learned Fortran, which eventually landed him a job at NCAR in 2001. He specializes in benchmarking and performance testing, and in his spare time he likes to fiddle with weird computing hardware, including GPU, FPGAs, and other computational accelerators.
I'm not the guy who models obstructed water flows around oblate spheroids in S-shaped pipes, using pentagonal, finite elements with moving boundaries.
I do boring, practical stuff. I'm the guy who unclogs your toilet.
It's worth knowing how to work a toilet plunger. Otherwise, you always have to pay a plumber, and we're expensive.
Speaker Description:
Jeffrey S. Haemer is Software Configuration Manager at Aztek Networks, in Boulder, Colorado.
Dr. Haemer has worked and consulted on various aspects of software manufacturing since 1983, when he helped produce the first, Intel-based, Unix system: PC/IX on the IBM PC/XT.
He has done Unix and Linux education and training for organizations like Uniforum and the University of Colorado, and in places like Romania and Kuwait. He has served as Standards Representative for the Usenix Association. He is a contributing author of The Linux Administration Handbook and has published over a hundred articles and papers on software engineering for Unix and Linux.
He coordinates the monthly, speakers program for the Boulder Linux Users Group.
When building a graphical user interface to run on multiple operating systems, there are many toolkits to choose from. Many traditional toolkits require deploying object code or byte-code to each computer, which requires periodically updating each computer with the latest code. Since nearly all computers have web browsers, an alternative is to write a GUI using a web browser. Current web browsers now support HTML/XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, AJAX, Forms, DHTML, SVG/VML/Canvas that provide a high level of interactivity.
Speaker Description:
Joe VanAndel graduated from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI with a double major of mathematics and physics in 1978. He earned his master's degree in computer science at University of California at Berkeley in 1980. Joe worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Westminster, CO on a real-time operating system called Oryx/Pecos. His next job was with Cadnetix, where he worked on porting Unix to proprietary workstations and servers, computer aided design tools, and software configuration management. In 1988, Joe started working at NCAR/EOL. His initial job was to lead a software team that transformed a prototype radar into a research testbed that served the FAA and the National Weather Service. Since this project, Joe has mostly worked on remote sensing with radars and lidars. He also worked on Driftsonde - a stratospheric balloon system that drops sondes from 90,000 feet in remote areas of the planet.
There are a few known bugs: if your players refuse to play the presentation, this is usually due to the version software you are using and could also be related to your OS. Some known recent issues are with Snow Leopard Quicktime compatibility with the new streaming server or a delayed green screen of 10 seconds before the video resolves to full screen. We are working on a completely browser-based solution to overcome these bugs
