Meeting-20110409

WPLUG will have a General User Meeting and presentation on Saturday, April 9, 2011, starting at 2pm in the auditorium (bottom floor) of the Wilkins School Community Center.

Schedule for the Day

1:30pm - Doors open, set up
2:00pm - Business Meeting starts
2:30pm - Featured Presentation
3:30pm - Meeting ends, everyone out. We are likely to go to D's 6pack or Square Cafe for lunch.

Speaker/Presentation

Name: Timo Mechler

One Paragraph Bio: James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business 2010 Graduated 2010 MBA. Master’s degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 2008. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics from Luther College in 2006.

Talk Title:

Improving the Energy Efficiency of IT Data Center Server Farms

One Paragraph Talk Description:

IT data centers are one of the largest and fastest growing power consumers in the world today. With energy costs continuing to rise, data centers faced with making difficult tradeoffs between power and performance. In fact, in a recent EPA report, it was estimated that power costs for U.S. data centers would total $7.4 billion in 2011, with approximately half of that cost being attributed to servers alone. What exacerbates the matter especially is that servers are heavily underutilized on average, wasting expensive power in the process. Despite advances in virtualization technology in recent years, servers today are still utilized less than 20% on average, demonstrating that this problem has not been solved sufficiently.

POW Solutions is commercializing cutting edge power management algorithms developed in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon which address this problem by more efficiently matching demand (incoming workload to the data center) with available supply (the amount of machines available in the data center). In this talk, I will give an overview of how our software solution will perform this optimization, and spend some time discussing how POW uses Linux as an OS platform to develop for, but also as a software development environment. I will finish by briefly discussing the business case to be made for server power savings and optimization in data centers.

Meeting Minutes

The regular meeting of the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group was held on Saturday, April 9, 2011, at 2:05 PM, at the Wilkins School Community Center. In the absence of the Chair, the Vice-Chair served as presiding officer. The regular Secretary was present. The minutes of the January 8, 2011 meeting were approved as read.

The Vice-Chair reported that volunteers are still needed to serve on the various WPLUG committees. Anyone interested in helping should contact info@wplug.org.

The Secretary reported that WPLUG currently has 26 members.

The Treasurer reported that there is $680.42 in the checking account.

The Program Committee reported that a presentation regarding GNUstep was being arranged for May in conjunction with Pittsburgh CocoaHeads. The specific meeting date, time, and location are yet to be determined.

The Public Relations Committee reported that Novell/SUSE recently held a Linux promotional event at a Penguins hockey game. Although well presented, attendance was light. The committee also discussed staffing a booth at a local hamfest event to promote WPLUG to this audience.

The Wilkins School Networking Committee reported that volunteers are still needed to fully complete the project.

A member reported that there are local organizations which need assistance building and improving their web presence, and encouraged people to get involved with these groups. The web site http://www.homelessfund.org/ was given as an example; this organization serves local at-risk, orphaned, and homeless children.

The meeting adjourned at 2:20 PM.

Vance Kochenderfer
Secretary, Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group

(Approved on July 9, 2011 - VK)

Meeting Staff

If you would like to volunteer to assist with this meeting, please add your name to one or more of the categories below.

• Host: Terry Golightly Vice Chair Wplug
• Co-Host: Your name here
• Donuts/Bagels: Your name here
• Setup: Your name here, Your name here
• Clean Up: Your name here, Your name here

Carpooling

• Your name/location here