[svlug] Tonight's presentation by AB Perisamy

[Rick Moen]

A couple of things:  AB (Anand Babu) Perisamy is a brilliant and
extremely nice computer scientist whom I used to work with when he 
was CTO of California Digital Corporation (CDC) in Fremont.  He'd been 
architect of 'Thunder', the 1024-machine Linux compute cluster that 
CDC built for Lawrence Livermore Labs -- beating out bidders a hundred
times the size of that firm, and winning the #2 spot on the Top500 
list of the world's fastest supercomputers.  (The #1 spot, which was 
I believe a Fujitsu mainframe) cost many, many times what Thunder did.)

About Gluster:  The world's needed a really good network filesystem for
a long time, and Gluster might just be it -- and it's GPLv3!  Don't 
think of this as merely something super-exotic that you'll never use.
Think of it as something that _may_ become as common as Samba and NFS
for the real world.  Red Hat seems to agree; they happily bought out
Gluster, Inc. late last year, after we scheduled this talk.

Back to AB, who's now head of Red Hat Storage:  He's an interesting guy
who's been involved in a wide range of open source / free software
projects, as I listed in the announcement.  Maybe we can cajole him
into telling him a bit about what it's like at Red Hat, and about his
other projects, too.  Please consider coming.