Invitations
DrupalCon Szeged
Good news! The next Drupal conference (DrupalCon) will take place in Szeged, Hungary from August 27-30. If you want to learn more about Drupal, or if you want to capture and absorb the passion and enthusiasm behind the Drupal project, this is the place to be.
DrupalCon Szeged will bring together hundreds of Drupal users and developers from all around the world. Whether you are a Drupal professional or an enthusiastic user coming to find out more, you're invited to join us in Szeged. Mark your calendars!
This will be the first Drupal conference in Central Europe, and I'm excited by that. There are a lot of Drupal people in Central Europe, probably more so than in Western Europe, and this is a great way to reach out them. Plus, I've been to Hungary twice and liked it very much.
Public PhD defense
In exactly two weeks, I have my public PhD defense.
Title
Profiling Techniques for Performance Analysis and Optimization of Java Applications
Abstract
As Java applications become more complex and as virtualization becomes more important, we need to investigate profiling techniques that combine information captured at different layers of the execution stack. We present three novel profiling techniques. The central attribute of these contributions is that they link information gathered at different levels of the execution stack, and that this information is used to gather more complete profiles. By collecting information at the micro-processor level, we have profile information that is more accurate, faster to obtain, or that was otherwise not available. We show that these advances in profiling techniques lead to better understanding of program behavior and faster executing Java applications.
Logistics
The presentation is free to attend for all, but RSVP by e-mail or in the comments. It starts at 16:00h on Thursday, January 24th, and will take place at the Jozef Plateauzaal (Jozef Plateaustraat 22, 9000 Gent).
FOSDEM 2008: call for speakers
Mark your agendas because the Drupal project got a 200-person developer room at FOSDEM on Sunday, February 24th. FOSDEM, which stands for Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, is a yearly free and non-commercial event for the open source community, held in Brussels (Belgium). With more than 3,000 attendees coming from all over the world, FOSDEM is the biggest open source event in Europe.
We will use the developer room to meet, discuss, and talk about Drupal. Right now, we're looking for speakers so let us know in the comments if you want to give a presentation. Alternatively, feel free to request presentation topics as well. Joeri Poesen from Krimson is the lead schedule wrestler.
DrupalCon Boston
Good news! The next Drupal conference (DrupalCon) will take place in Boston from March 3-6. If you want to learn more about Drupal, or if you want to capture and absorb the passion and enthusiasm behind the Drupal project, this is the place to be.
The last Drupal conference, DrupalCon Barcelona, was capped at 450 people and sold out so this time around, we're trying to accommodate 700 Drupal people. Yes, these numbers blow my mind.
In other words, DrupalCon Boston will bring together hundreds of Drupal users and developers from all around the world. Whether you are a Drupal professional or an enthusiastic user coming to find out more, you're invited to join us in Boston.
Furthermore, DrupalCon is being held at the same time/place as AIIM International Exposition & Conference, the largest content management technology conference in North America. The goal: introduce Drupal to thousands of potential new Drupalers.
Organizing a conference of this size obviously takes a lot of resources; if you are interested in being a sponsor, please get in touch. Kudos to the DrupalCon Boston team and the Drupal Association for taking on this massive amount of work. This is not something we should take for granted. Thanks!
The impact of multicore architectures on software
After my internal PhD defense next Thursday, Michael Hind (a member of my PhD dissertation committee) will give a presentation about the impact of multicore architectures on software. Feel free to attend!
Abstract
Mainstream computer vendors have announced two dramatic changes in their future architectures. First, the clock speed and the amount of cache memory per processor will dramatically change. Namely, the exponential increase in clock frequency we've experienced over the past decades will cease to occur, and in some cases processor speeds will decrease. Also, the relative amount of cache memory for a processor will decrease. Second, there will be exponentially increasing number of processor cores on a chip.
These changes present two unprecedented challenges to the software stack:
- How does the software deal with the loss of single threaded performance and cache memory, and
- How does the software utilize the additional capabilities provided by multiple cores on a chip?
In his talk, Michael will argue why these challenges present great opportunities for software optimization and suggest some approaches to address these fundamental problems.
FOSDEM 2008: Drupal developer room?
FOSDEM, which stands for Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, is a yearly free and non-commercial event for the open source community, held in Brussels (Belgium).
Each year FOSDEM sets up developer rooms where teams can meet, discuss, hack and present the latest developments about their project. Joeri Poesen from Krimson, a Belgian Drupal company, is taking the lead in trying to secure and organize a Drupal developer room at FOSDEM this year. Thanks Joeri!
(I co-organized a Drupal developer room in 2005 and can attest that it is a fun and rewarding experience.)
In order to qualify for a room, we need a number of people who are willing to present about Drupal. If you're interested, let us known in the comments or reply to Joeri's call for action or add your thoughts to the wiki. Drupal users unite!
Bonjour Montreal
I'm currently in Montreal (Canada) for OOPSLA, where Andy will present our statistically rigorous Java performance evaluation paper and where I'll talk about our work on using hardware performance monitors to drive dynamic compilation of Java applications.
In addition to the PhD related festivities, Drupal rockstar Angie Byron is organizing a Drupal dinner on Tuesday evening. Drupal users unite!
The WIFI at the Hyatt Regency in Montreal sucks monkey balls. I feel incredibly unproductive, cross and out of sync when I wake up in the middle of the night. So much for working the Drupal 6 issue queues ...
The view from my room in the Hyatt Regency.