News

The first annual Rocks Clusters Workshop "Rocks-A-Palooza" was held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on May 18 and 19, 2005. More than 90 people attended, with participants coming from Norway, Chile, Mexico, Singapore, Canada, as well as from across the United States to learn about and discuss all aspects of commodity clusters, the Rocks Cluster Distribution, and Rocks Roll development.

The free workshop had two parallel tracks: one for new users and one for advanced users and developers. In addition to lectures, the advanced track included break-out sessions for individuals to talk with Rocks developers about specific issues in Rocks development. AMD and SDSC co-sponsored the event.

The workshop featured lectures from SDSC's Rocks Development Group but also included talks from the Rocks user community. Speakers included: Steve Jones (Stanford University), Roy Dragseth (University of Tromsø), Najib Ninaba and Sivaram Shunmugam (Scalable Systems), Robert Konecny (UCSD), Greg Bruno, Sandeep Chandra, Mason Katz, Phil Papadopoulos, Federico Sacerdoti, Vladimir Veytser, and Nadya Williams (SDSC).

Event organizers Bruno and Katz were very pleased with the turnout and the amount of interaction that took place between the participants. "One of the attendees told me he learned more about clusters in a day and a half than he had working in his lab the last six months," Katz said.

Scalable Systems and SDSC are planning the next workshop to be held in Singapore in conjunction with the GridAsia and CCGrid meetings in 2006. Tentative dates for Rocks-A-Palooza II are May 18 and 19, 2006.