Ten More Reasons to go to Oakland

By Ian Foster

Rich Wellner came up with four reasons to attend the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference, to be held in Oakland May 12-16. I outdid him and came up with 10:

1) Globus program is fantastic, including tutorials, advanced
technical presentations, contributed talks, and community events on
every aspect of Globus.

2) Gobs of other material on Sun Grid Engine and Rocks, and
other open source grid and cluster software.

3) Gathering: A great opportunity to meet colleagues, peers,
collaborators from the grid and cluster community. The only grid
meeting in the US the rest of this year--the next two OGFs are in Spain
(June) and Singapore (September).

4) GT4.2: You'll get to learn about the exciting new features
in Globus Toolkit 4.2. New execution, data, security, information,
virtualization, and core services.

5) Gratfication (immediate) as you get to provide your input
on future directions for Globus, Sun Grid Engine, Rocks, and other open
source systems--and maybe sign up to contribute to those developments.

6) Grid solutions: You'll get to meet the people using Globus
to build enterprise grid solutions in projects like caBIG, TeraGrid,
Earth System Grid, MEDICUS, and LIGO, and learn about solution tools
like Introduce, MPI-G, Swift, Taverna, and UniCluster.

7) Gurus: You get to grill the Globus gurus--or, if you prefer,
show off your own Globus guru status.

8) Great price: $490 registration is substantially cheaper than
OGF or HPDC, for example, and the hotel rate is reasonable ($149).

9) Gorgeous location: Oakland is easy to get to -- SFO (with
easy BART  train ride), Oakland, and San Jose airports also nearby.
Just a 10 minute train ride to download San Francisco. A lovely time to
be in the Bay Area.

10) Gorilla and guerilla free: None of the corporate marketing
talks that diluted the last GridWorld conference--apart from two
sponsor talks, this is pure tech, and highly useful tech at that!