Next Meeting – April 9th, 2013

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library

Big Data

Speaker: Sharan Kalwani

These days one cannot swing a dead cat without hitting the buzz phrase “Big Data”! So what is all this hoopla (or Hadoop) all about really? Many years of technology advances in processing power, cheaper storage, faster I/O capabilities, cheaper memory chips, greater WiFi coverage, widespread mobility
have *all* contributed to a vast explosion of information in all shapes and forms. The term “Big Data” first came into usage about 6+ years ago, when a major database scientist wrote about a new paradigm of science (sometimes also called the fourth pillar) – one which is based on letting the data tell us what
was really going on, as opposed to guessing up a hypothesis/theory and then running with it. Of course, our beloved Linux platform was a key enabler in this and the Hadoop framework, which was born from an engineer’s work, originally inspired by a couple of papers written by Google’s team. This talk will dwell on many “Big D” (pun intended!) topics, history, what this means in technology terms and more importantly the impact on society.

Sharan Kalwani is an HPC specialist with 20+ years of experience. Sharan has degrees in both Engineering and Computer Science. He has worked in IT architecture, systems deployment, software development, OS kernels, UNIX device driver writing, networking and compilers. He has also worked on
several engineering, technical & scientific applications. Sharan has worked with several computing vendors such as Cray Research, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), etc. He has managed several very large HPC sites with corporate organizations such as General Motors (GM) and research universities (KAUST). Sharan is a member of IEEE/Computer Society, USENIX, Michigan User Group and the ACM.

Elections

We will be holding our board elections for the 2013-2014 period. Nominations are currently open for those who would like to serve on the board. There are six spaces available for nominations, and the term runs through April 2014. Nominations for the board should be sent to board@mug.org by April 9th, 2013 at 6:30pm. Voting will commence at the meeting.

You must be a current paid member in order to serve on the board or vote for the board. Please see the Membership page for details.

Book Swap

Bring your old and gently used books to trade and swap with other folks. Take a book or leave a book, or do both. You don’t need to bring anything to take something home. We’ll send out more information about how this will work on the Discussion mailing list.
And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.