Some of the most interesting conversations I've had working in the Kirkland office have been sitting around the lunch table. Bringing together smart people working on tough problems and encouraging them to brainstorm seems to generate the most innovative new ideas.
The fact is Googlers love to discuss new ideas, and not just with each other. That is why we we're planning two conferences to share ideas. We want to hear about what other people in the technical community are doing to face the same hard problems we work on. Our Seattle conference on scalable systems is in June, and our second annual Test Automation Conference will take place New York in August.
There's still time to submit a proposal for either one. The Testing Automation Conference deadline for submissions is Friday, April 6 (email gtac-submission@google.com).
As for the Seattle Scalability Conference, if "Beowulf" doesn't remind you of English literature, or you didn't know "Selenium" is also an element, you're just the person we're waiting to hear from. Here's a list of some of the topics we'd be interested in (you may have others):
Scalable algorithms:
- Parallelization techniques (fully automatic or programmer-assisted)
- Programming models and languages for multiprocessor systems (e.g., transactional memory, systems of communicating objects)
- Algorithms that function in the face of system failures (flaky hardware, os bugs, network failures)
- Managing large computation clusters (configuration, upgrade, repair, status monitoring)
- Managing failure (automatic failure detection/diagnosis/repair)
- Opportunities and challenges of multi-core architecture
- Job management systems/schedulers for large compute clusters
