Accessibility in the Clouds

So, as many of you hopefully were successful at seeing old friends and making new ones at SIGCSE 2008, I was busy in the back room keeping the whole thing going ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain ...") -- that's why we have co-chairs, so while Susan Rodger would provide "cover", I was able to meet some interesting people as well -- too many to list here, but that's why I return each year to this conference.

One group involves how to teach students for large-scale (actually, growing in scale), data intensive computing as realized on the Internet today -- with a background in HPSC and dependable computing (actually, performability, just to test your spell-checker), I am professionally interested in how to get students (esp. at a small college) to think big; or better yet, to experience big.

Long story short, I am pleased to say that others are interested too, so to have such a discussion I help orchestrate a workshop on DISC, or Data-Intensive Scalable Computing -- it's happening fast, this July 16-18 at the University of Washington -- so do not delay, visit this link to apply.

I was moved to put this announcement for the workshop as I read this article about how politics may impact "cloud computing," the media buzz term for DISC -- they note that global politics may impact OLPC efforts to reach certain populations -- well, it is part of society, but I do not have to like it (so in response, I am working on a song "When Science Meets Society," check later to see if I make enough progress to post the song :-).