On Saturday June 14th Google will host the 2nd Seattle Conference on Scalability. I’m planning to be there.

Interesting topics
Given the dual-track format, I may not be able to see everything I’d like. Here’s what looks cool to me:

  • CARMEN: a Scalable Science Cloud. “CARMEN is a $9M project building a scalable science cloud. Its focus is on supporting neuroscientists who will use it to store, share and analyse 100s of TBs of data.”
  • Chapel: Productive Parallel Programming at Scale. “Chapel is a new programming language being developed by Cray Inc. as part of the DARPA-led High Productivity Computing Systems Program (HPCS). . . . Language concepts that support this goal include abstractions for globally distributed data aggregates and anonymized task-based parallelism.”
  • Conquering Scalability Challenges with Transactional Billing. “A huge problem faced in the world of billing and charging is the ability to process a large number of transactions per day.”
  • GIGA+: Scalable Directories for Shared File Systems. “This talk is about how to build file system directories that contain billions to trillions of entries and grow the number of entries instantly with all cores contributing concurrently. The central tenet of our work is to push the limits of scalability by minimizing serialization, eliminating system-wide synchronization, and using weaker consistency semantics.”
  • maidsafe: A new networking paradigm. “We describe a significant new way of networking and data handling globally. This data centric network is likely to revolutionize the IT industry in a very positive fashion.”

Here’s a link to registration and all the presentations.

The StorageMojo take
They all look good, don’t they? I’m very interested in the transactional billing talk, since the major reason for the disconnect between IT and the lines of business is that IT is essentially tax-supported rather than priced.

IT costs are peanut-buttered across LOB overhead – so expensive resources get over-consumed – leading to over-configuration and business value blindness. These guys aren’t talking about that problem – but it is the key to making utility computing and SOA business tools instead of marketectures.

Comments welcome, of course. I’m looking forward to seeing Seattle with blue skies.