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2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 27-July 2, 2004, Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston, MA
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  TECHNICAL SESSIONS

Complete Technical Sessions
By Day: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday
By Session: General Sessions | FREENIX | SIGs | Guru Is In | WiPs

Locations: See the complete technical sessions.

Thursday, July 1
9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m. Thursday
Plenary Session
Cheap Hardware + Fault Tolerance = Web Site

Rob Pike, Google, Inc.
Listen in MP3 format
Coding

The Web is too large to fit on a single machine, so it's no surprise that searching the Web requires the coordination of many machines, too. A single Google query may touch over a thousand machines before the results are returned to the user, all in a fraction of a second.

With all those machines, the opportunities for parallelism and distributed computation are offset by the likelihood of hardware failure. If one machine breaks on average every few years, a pool of a thousand machines will have machines break on a daily basis. A key part of the Google story is that by designing a system to cope with breakage, we can provide not only robustness, but also parallelizability, efficiency, and economies of scale.

Rob Pike is a member of the Systems Lab at Google, Inc. In 1981, while at Bell Labs, he wrote the first bitmap window system for UNIX. He has since written a dozen more. He is a principal designer and implementer of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and co-author with Brian Kernighan of The UNIX Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming.

10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.   Break  
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Thursday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Free Desktop Linux/Open Source
Glitz: Hardware Accelerated Image Compositing Using OpenGL
Peter Nilsson and David Reveman, Umeå University

High Performance X Servers in the Kdrive Architecture
Eric Anholt, LinuxFund

How Xlib Is Implemented (and What We're Doing About It)
Jamey Sharp, Portland State University

SIG SESSIONS
UseLinux SIG Coding Linux/Open Source Sysadmin
The FlightGear Flight Simulator
Alexander R Perry, PAMurray

Making RCU Safe for Deep Sub-Millisecond Response Realtime Applications
Dipankar Sarma and Paul E. McKenney, IBM

Making Hardware Just Work
Robert Love, Ximian

GURU SESSIONS
Deploying the Lustre Cluster File Systems
Phil Schwan, Cluster File Systems, Inc.
Linux/Open Source Networking Security Sysadmin
Lustre is the only Linux cluster fileystem to be POSIX compliant and to be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Lustre powers four of the top five Linux-based supercomputers in the world. Phil, as a major implementer of Lustre, will be here to discuss using issues regarding cluster filesystems.
12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)  
1:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m. Thursday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Security Linux/Open Source Security
Awarded Best Student Paper!
Design and Implementation of Netdude, a Framework for Packet Trace Manipulation
Christian Kreibich, University of Cambridge, UK

Trusted Path Execution for the Linux 2.6 Kernel as a Linux Security Module
Niki A. Rahimi, IBM

Modular Construction of DTE Policies
Serge E. Hallyn, IBM Linux Technology Center, and Phil Kearns, College of William and Mary

SIG SESSIONS
UseLinux SIG Coding Linux/Open Source Sysadmin
Custom Debian Distributions
Benjamin Mako Hill, Debian Project

Building and Maintaining an International Volunteer Linux Community
Jenn Vesperman, Author and Consultant, and Val Henson, Sun Microsystems

Indexing Arbitrary Data with SWISH-E
Josh Rabinowitz, SkateboardDirectory.com

GURU SESSIONS
Sysadmin Management/General
David Parter, University of Wisconsin, Madison
BSD Linux/Open Source Sysadmin
David has been a system administrator at the University of Wisconsin Computer Science Department since 1991, serving as Associate Director of the Computer Systems Lab since 1995, guiding a staff of 8 full-time sysdamins and supervising up to 12 student sysadmins at a time. His experiences in this capacity include working with other groups on campus; providing technical leadership to the group; managing the budget; dealing with vendors; dealing with faculty; and training students. As a consultant, he has dealt with a variety of technical and management challenges.
3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.   Break  
3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Thursday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Demonstration: Croquet, a Networked Collaborative 3D Immersive Environment
Dave Reed, Hewlett-Packard Labs
Coding Linux/Open Source
SIG SESSIONS
UseLinux SIG Coding Linux/Open Source
Linux and Genomics: The Two Revolutions
Martin Krzywinski and Yaron Butterfield, Genome Sciences Centre

Thin Client Linux, a Case Presentation of Implementation
Martin Echt, Capital Cardiology Associates, and Jordan Rosen, Lille Corp.

Towards Carrier Grade Linux Platforms
Presentation Slides (PDF)
Ibrahim Haddad, Ericsson Research

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Last changed: 13 July 2004 ch