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October 2007 Newsletter of the
Front Range UNIX Users Group


Cndnsd Vrsn: 4:00PM Thursday 10/18 — Parallel NFS

Contents:


Storage Throughput with Parallel NFS

The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users Group (FRUUG) will be at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, October 18 in the Main Seminar Room at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder More details are in Meeting Location (below).

Everyone knows that data is growing at an astronomical rate, and that a centralized pool of storage is easier to manage than direct-attached disk drives in every server. There are numerous ways to scale Network File System (NFS) storage performance and capacity, including using multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs) in a single storage server, increasing CPU, memory, and disk speeds, and using clusters.

Parallel NFS (pNFS) offers a new way to increase both performance and capacity of network storage systems. pNFS, a new feature in NFS Version 4.1, decouoples metadata from data access, and allows for data access to occur in parallel across multiple servers. This allows for some interesting new choices in managing NFS data, including striping it across multiple storage servers. The high performance expected of pNFS makes it a promising technology for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications and enterprise datacenters as well. Sam Falkner from Sun Microsystems will outline the emerging pNFS standards, and the efforts underway to implement a pNFS client and server in the OpenSolaris operating system.

About The Speaker

Sam Falkner has worked at Sun Microsystems since April of 1992. Most of that time has been spent in file systems development, spanning CacheFS, UFS, and NFS. He is currently on the development team for Parallel NFS, which is planned for release in 2008.


Meeting Location

This meeting will be held in the Main Seminar Room at NCAR's Mesa Lab. The address is 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder 80303, though it's amazingly simple to find: take Table Mesa Drive in Boulder west until you can't go any farther. (access from US 36, Broadway, or Foothills Parkway). For a map, visit www.ucar.edu/org/mesalabmap.shtml. Come early to enjoy the stunning views or take a walk on the trails immediately to the west of the building.

For the meeting, come in the main entrance and sign in at the front desk, where they will be expecting a number of us visiting.


Our Last Meeting

At our last meeting, Bruce Haddon discussed the subleties of the Unicode Standard, Version 5.0. Unicode is fascinating because it promotes the concept of a "universal character set" that brings into focus complex and fascinating problems of human written communication. If you missed Bruce's talk, his slides and his review of the standard are available in the meeting archive.

Announcements, presentation slides, and writeups for past meetings are available in the FRUUG Meeting Archive. www.fruug.org/mtgarchive/index.html.


Books, Books, Books

As you may have noticed, our meeting frequency has slowed down, but we still continue to receive review copies of books from our publisher friends. This has caused our book cart to overflow, so to make room for the new titles we're getting in, we're going to give away the "old" titles that are currently on the cart.

For the next few meetings, we'll be bringing a box full of books from the cart that we'll give away to those attending. The range of topics these books cover include the Java programming language, Internet security, Web technology, and software engineering. There will be enough books that virtually everyone who attends will be able to grab a title of interest.


FRUUG Library Notes

Until we settle into a permanent home (and NCAR may be that home), we'll only be bringing our new FRUUG library titles to each meeting. Learn how you can review a book and keep it through our FRUUG Library Merit Badge program.

Our publisher friends have some exciting news: Addison Wesley and O'Reilly (and their associated imprints) are now offering a user group discount of 35 percent, see our library discounts page for details.

New books for this meeting include:

  • The Apache Modules Book, from Prentice Hall
  • The Linux Programmer's Toolbox, from Prentice Hall
  • Extended STL, from Volume 1, Addison Wesley
  • Enterprise Ajax, from Prentice Hall
  • The Official Damn Small Linux Book, from Prentice Hall
  • The Official Ubuntu Book, from Prentice Hall
  • RailsSpace, from Addison Wesley
  • Ajax Construction Kit, from Prentice Hall
  • The Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers, from New Riders

You may check out books using your business card as your library card; you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books are due at the meeting following the one in which they are checked out.

Remember that your FRUUG membership entitles you to up to 35 percent discounts on your book orders from Addison Wesley/Prentice Hall, IBM Press, O'Reilly Media, New Riders, No Starch, Paraglyph, PC Publishing, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Sams Publishing, SitePoint, and Syngress; refer to the FRUUG Web site library page for details.

Site Map Recruiter Info
February 15, 2009

February 2008: FRUUG Enters Quiescent Phase
After 27 years running, we're suspending operations.

Future Meetings:
None planned

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