Boston Scalability
User Group

Hi all,
Our next meeting is Wednesday March 24 at 6 p.m.  We meet at the usual location: the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.

This month will be another round-table discussion like our February meeting where we discussed topics like NoSQL and it’s assumptions/assertions, JVM languages like Clojure and degrading your services gracefully when things go wrong.

If you have anything you’d like to discuss you can email me at anthony@bostonsug.org and we can bring it up during the meeting.

More meeting details will come as we near the meeting date.

Anthony

Our next meeting is on Wednesday February 24 at 6 p.m.  We will have this meeting at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.  The address is 404 Wyman St. (North Entrance) Waltham, MA 02451.  IBM is in the north suite.  This is the same entrance you would take if you were going in to Novell.

We now have network access in the IBM meeting rooms and I’ll have a short demo prepared for using Redis, an in-memory data structures server.  This will be a round-table discussion meeting so bring your questions, answers and experience to discuss with the group.

We do not yet have regular food sponsorship so please let me know if you know of anyone that can help us out.  In the mean time I’ll say bring a snack to hold you over until we go to Bertucci’s after the meeting.

I placed a book order with O’Reilly so we may have some book raffles next week too.  If they don’t arrive in time for next week’s meeting we’ll have plenty at the March meeting.

Also, don’t forget to sign up for our announcement list if you haven’t already.  At the top of the page click “announcement list” to go to the sign up page.

I look forward to seeing everyone next week at 6 p.m.!

Anthony
anthony at bostonsug dot org

This is just a reminder that our February meeting is tomorrow night.  All the meeting details are at the meeting announcement page.  Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO and scalability blogger, will speak about the challenges of dynamic scaling and space-based architecture.

We’ll get started at 6 p.m.  See you tomorrow night!

Wednesday February 18 at 6 p.m. BostonSUG hosts a presentation by GigaSpaces co-founder and CTO Nati Shalom.  Nati runs a notable cloud computing blog and is an industry expert with distributed technology.  This talk will cover several different topics including:

• Dynamically scaling your application based on current demand
• Situations where space-based architecture is useful
• Infrastructure fault tolerance and self-healing
• Virtualizing servers “in the cloud”
• The effect latency has on scalability

Nati’s blog is a great source of information for anyone interested in building scalable applications.  This talk is sure to be informative based solely on the content of his blog.  Nati is an experienced technologist and he helps large financial firms and telcom companies build out their services to handle extreme load.

As usual we meet at the IBM Innovation Center.  The address is 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.  The meeting start time is 6 p.m. on Wednesday February 18.

Meeting registration is now open.  Please register for the meeting if you plan to attend.  Of course you can come if you don’t register.  Everyone is welcome and attendance is free.

If you can’t make this meeting but want to find out about future BostonSUG meetings you can join our announcement list.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions you can reach me at anthony@bostonsug.org.  See you on the 18th!

We have to reschedule tonight’s meeting due to the weather.  Please be on the lookout for the new meeting date.  In the next day or so I will send out both the rescheduled meeting date and the announcement for our regularly scheduled February meeting.

BostonSUG is back after a short winter break!  Our first meeting of 2009 takes place on Wednesday January 28 at 6 p.m.  As usual we meet at the IBM Innovation Center at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.

Join us for our first technology round-table discussion format.  As a group we will examine the scalability platforms and tools we used in 2008.  Do you have questions about the best use of Amazon Web Services?  What are the pros and cons of using an event-based architecture?  Have you got experience using memcached that you’d like to share?  Still unsure of why you’d want to use a data grid like Coherence or WebSphere eXtreme Scale?  This is the meeting you’ve been waiting for if you have these questions or answers to them.  Bring any questions or experience you have to the table and we’ll all come away from the meeting more knowledgeable and capable of building scalable applications.

We will also look ahead at what is to come in 2009.  Will Rails 3.0 be the platform of choice for building scalable apps?  How will Open Source Java projects like Hibernate Shards fair in ‘09?  Does Google AppEngine have what it takes to gain major marketshare?  What will define “Cloud Computing” this year and how will you use it in your projects?  When does it make sense to virtualize your infrastructure?  The scalability round-table is the place to discuss all these things and more.

Bring your opinions, questions and answers to our first round-table meeting and discuss the present and future of scalable applications.  There will be bottled water and snacks at this meeting.  It will be open discussion with moderation if and when required.  Everyone will have a chance to voice their opinions and ask their questions.  We’ll all do our best to give good answers.

This meeting takes place on Wednesday January 28, 2009 at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA 02451.  Start time is 6 p.m.  Please register for this meeting if you plan to attend.  Attendance is always free.  If you can not make this meeting but want to find out about future meetings please sign up for our announcement list.

Please send any questions to anthony@bostonsug.org.

Thanks everyone!  Hope to see you on the 28th!

Anthony

Our next meeting takes place on Wednesday October 22 at 6 p.m. in the IBM Innovation Center.  This month we have Nikita Ivanov, founder of the GridGain project.  There will be pizza at this meeting!  Please register for this meeting if you plan to attend.  Attendance is always free.  If you can not make this meeting but want to find out about future meetings please sign up for our announcement list.

This meeting takes place at the IBM Innovation Center located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451.  The pizza will arrive at 5:45 p.m. and the meeting starts at 6.  See you on the 22nd!

GridGain 2.0 – Grid Computing Made Simple

Abstract
The topic of this presentation is about fastest growing open source Java grid computing framework called GridGain and how its focus on elegant simplicity and Enterprise Java integration is helping to revolutionize the grid computing for Java in the same way as Spring or JBoss have changed Enterprise Java landscape.

The presentation will start with a brief introduction to grid computing and specifically data and compute grids. MapReduce will be discussed. Real-life examples will be discussed.

Following introduction to grid computing presentation will outline the key features of GridGain 2.0 highlighting simplicity of the usage.

To underscore the topic of presentation it will also include live demonstration of writing a simple application and grid enabling it to run on a small grid right in front of the audience. All coding during demonstration will be done live. Detailed and in-depth explanations will highlight that grid computing in Java can be fun, simple and productive to use in everyday applications and systems.

Outline

• Introduction
• What is Grid Computing?
  • Compute grids (MapReduce)
  • Data grids
• Why is Grid Computing?
• What is GridGain?
• Key Features
  • Advanced MapReduce
  • Zero deployment
  • Automatic fault tolerance
  • SPI-based architecture
  • JMX-based management & monitoring
  • Early and late load balancing
  • Annotation-based grid enabling with AOP
• Live coding demonstration
• Conclusion
• Q&A

Speaker’s Profile
Mr. Ivanov has over 15 years of experience in software development and over 7 years of developing grid computing and distributed middleware, a vision and pragmatic view of where development technology is going, and high quality standards in software engineering.

Back in 1996, Mr. Ivanov was one of the pioneers in using Java technology for server side middleware development while working at T-Systems GmbH, one of the largest European System Integrator.

Mr. Ivanov has held various positions architecting and leading software product development for start-up companies and working with well-established companies such as Adaptec, Visa and BEA Systems. Mr. Ivanov is an active member of Java middleware community and is a contributor to Java specifications as a member of JSR-107.

Mr. Ivanov holds a Master’s degree in Electro Mechanics from Baltic State Technical University, Saint Petersburg, Russia.