In the halls at LinuxCon Europe 2015

Penguins in Dublin

© Photos by Richard Ibbotson

© Photos by Richard Ibbotson

Article from Issue 181/2015
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This year's LinuxCon Europe brought Linux users and developers to Dublin, Ireland, for keynotes, technical talks, and lots of memorable community moments.

The LinuxCon caravan moved to the Dublin Convention Center on October 5-7, 2015, for LinuxCon Europe 2015. This year's conference was probably one of the best GNU/Linux international events of 2015. The keynote speeches and conference presentations were excellent, and the conference covered a broad spectrum of important Linux topics. In addition to the main LinuxCon show, visitors could look in on the co-located CloudOpen conference or the ifelc embedded Linux conference without leaving the building. The Dublin conference center is one of the best in the world and quite a good advertisement for Dublin and for Ireland itself.

First Day

We ran through the pouring rain for the first keynote. The proceedings kicked off with Jim Zemlin giving his usual cheerful introduction to the conference. Jim introduced Sean Gourley for his talk on high-frequency trading and the rise of the algorithm. Gourley gave a fascinating account of how artificial intelligence is used to run complex systems like the New York Stock Exchange. Gourley, who was originally from New Zealand, is now based in San Francisco, where he splits his time between mathematical research and his venture-backed startup Quid, which he co-founded in 2009. His academic research has taken him from nanotechnology to complex systems and the mathematics of war, and, as a result of his research, he has acted as a political advisor to the US military and the Iraqi Government. In his keynote presentation, "Man vs. Machine: High Frequency Trading and the Rise of the Algorithm," he discussed the limitations of human mental capacity, describing what the brain can and can't do and how software developers can exploit this knowledge to explore niche markets.

Stefanie Chiras, Director for Scale-Out Power Systems for IBM, spoke on "Trading for the Digital Economy with Open Technology." Chiras showed that new computing models and workloads from cloud to big data and analytics to mobile and social platforms are transforming information technology. Linux, OpenStack, Docker, and other open technology projects are at the center of many of these innovations.

The final keynote of the morning came from Dronecode community directory Lorenz Meier and Tully Foote, platform manager for the Robot Operating System (ROS). Meier and Foote talked about the future of drones and open source. The Dronecode Project was started in late 2014 with the idea of uniting open source drone projects to provide a common codebase and help improve efficiency in software development.

The rest of Monday was filled with presentations like "What Does Container Security Look Like?" by Matthew Garrett of CoreOS, as well as the usual mix of embedded and cloud talks. One of the more entertaining presentations of the day was Rich Bowens' "Read the F* manual? Write a better F* manual." I think most of us have been there at one time or another.

Later Days

Tuesday was bright and breezy with the sun beaming down on us. The conference kicked off with Leigh Honeywell's talk on "Securing an Open Future". Then it was time for the container panel, which consisted of Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, Tom Barlow, Sebastien Goasguen, and Brandon Philips. Joe acted as the moderator. The panel discussed the concepts of containers and container security, offering predictions about where the container industry might be going. Other sessions over the three days of the conference offered more focused information about containers and also explored popular topics like the Internet of Things. Mark Sharpness's presentation on "Open Source Fueling the Growth of the Internet of Things" responded to criticisms from IoT skeptics and presented his opinion that an evangelical approach to putting Internet connections into fridges, cookers, and other domestic appliances is a trend for the future.

At 10:00am we adjourned for a coffee break, and visitors perused the long list of promising presentations to choose their itinerary for the rest of the day. One of my favorites talks was by Ruth Suehle and Tom Calloway, who gave a fascinating account of Raspberry Pi hardware and software.

Wednesday arrived, and people were beginning to look tired. The morning's keynote kicked off with Martin Fink talking about the open source revolution and the intersection of cloud with networking and telecommunications. Jeff Dione's talk on building the J Core CPU as open hardware interested the crowd quite a bit. The final keynote was David Mohally talking about Huawei's service provider operations lab. Probably one of the better parts of Wednesday's sessions was the mini-UEFI conference that took place inside the meeting rooms on the second floor. Mark Doran's talk about the UEFI forum update and open source community benefits was probably the most useful.

Grand Finale

Most conferences have some sort of reception for attendees at some point. On the final night, everyone went to the Guinness Storehouse for dinner and, yes you guessed it, some Guinness. Great way to end a conference based in Ireland. We all had a great time at the conference – I couldn't see a sad face anywhere. This year's LinuxCon Europe was a wonderful example of Irish hospitality at its best.

 

 

 

 

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