Intros and such - why are you here?

[Sam Skipsey]

Hi,

So, I'm Sam Skipsey, and I'm one of the "Data Experts" for GridPP, which is
the collaboration which provides the UK's contribution to compute and data
for the Large Hadron Collider, and other European grid computing projects.

We obviously deal with reasonably large amounts of data across the wider
grid, and within our larger sites (we have several sites in the UK which
have more than a PB of storage, the total capacity of GridPP is more than
20PB, and that of the worldwide grid is hundreds of PB according to my
monitoring). Our methods of data management and movement are a bit
different to some of the traditional Big Data models, for the most part,
but we're always interested in cross-fertilisation between projects that
manage lots of data. (And, of course, newer academic Big Data projects
might be better suited to approaches that we don't currently use.) A
majority of our install base uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives
(mostly Scientific Linux), so Fedora's approaches are also directly
interesting to us.

So, I'm here mostly observing to see what happens in the SIG, and might be
reporting back to our storage group in the UK.

Sam


On 7 March 2013 11:09, Robyn Bergeron <robyn.bergeron at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Since this is a new SIG and all that, I thought it would be lovely to
> perhaps introduce ourselves, and say a bit about why you're here and
> interested. Whether you're already doing things in this area, you'd
> like to learn about it, you want to do things, or you're just here to
> observe, or any other reason - any reason is a great reason :)
>
> And I guess that means: I get to go first. Hah.
>
> So, a bit about me and my interests here:
>
> I'm Robyn, I'm the Fedora Project Leader, and I like to make new
> things happen. :)
>
> Why big data? A few reasons:
>
> #1: I've always had a fascination with data and how it can be used as
> part of a decision-making process. I believe that agility is one of
> the most important differentiating factors for organizations. The
> ability to do things quickly, identify key trends and data points, and
> make decisions and act upon knowledge, enables organizations to move
> more intelligently.  And by intelligently I mean this: (a) Predicting
> the right thing to do based upon patterns, (b) being able to detect
> signs that you're doing the wrong thing - so that you can fix that
> faster.
>
> The cloud brings us the ability to utilize, deploy, orchestrate
> infrastructure more rapidly; having lots of data points, and the
> ability to analyze that information, comes through big data. Putting
> those two things together gets you to the point where you can analyze
> faster, or on a more ad-hoc basis, or deliver the capability to
> analyze random things more rapidly to the person who wants to act upon
> information.
>
> #2: SCIENCE! I think it's interconnected hugely here. I like to think
> that what we do in Fedora can help to change the world.  There is more
> information than ever about every little bit of the universe we live
> in, and helping people to sort through that leads to making the world
> a better place. I'll be passing out banjos and marshmallows for the
> campfire at the end of our meeting. Kumbaya :)
>
> #3: I think that people like to tinker with and learn about new stuff,
> and that Fedora is a great place to do that - "features" and "first"
> are two of our awesome foundations.  But I think that people are more
> interested in "the new stuff" than they are interested in "what it
> runs on" - so I hope that in bringing some interesting tools to
> Fedora, and making them work well, we can inspire some new people to
> use Fedora.  And hopefully inspire them to also become contributors,
> broaden the set of tools that we offer, give feedback about what we're
> doing, and encourage them to share *what* and *how* they did things.
>
> And that was long-winded. So I'll stop there. :D
>
> Anyone else?
> _______________________________________________
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> bigdata at lists.fedoraproject.org
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>
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