Report on the 3rd MIC Conference "Modern Technologies Closer To Us"
The early-bird participants came even before 9 a.m.
More photos
17.04.2009. It is the third time Microsoft Innovation Center has organized its annual conference entitled "Modern Technologies Closer To Us". Similarly to the year 2007 and 2008, the conference venue was in the PSNC headquarters, in the building of Poznań Science Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences at Wieniawskiego Street.
This time the conference was oriented towards three new research areas that the MIC in Poznań has been working on since the beginning of 2009: high performance computing (HPC), virtualization oraz interoperability of systems and solutions (the opportunity of cooperation of disparate technologies from different vendors). Therefore the conference might have been assumed to be a bit more technical this time. Despite of that the event gained much interest as usually and we finally had over 200 participants. Besides invited speakers, among the special guests there were: Dr Stanisław Starzak - Chancellor of the Technical University in Łódź, Prof. Roman Wyrzykowski the Director of Institute of Computing Science at Technical University of Częstochowa and Dr Marek Nawrocki - Dean of the Mathematics and Computing Science Faculty at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and others.
Dariusz Piotrowski (Microsoft
Poland) welcomes the conference guests
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The preparatory work began about a month earlier, and in the event day we started our activities before 7 a.m. Thanks to our punctual attendants we were able to start the conference exactly at 10. The conference participants were welcomed by Dr Maciej Stroiński, the Technical Director of PSNC, and Dariusz Piotrowski, Director of the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft Poland. Just then Norbert Meyer (PSNC) introduced the current status of Microsoft Innovation Center activities as well as its development plans.
During this part of the conference it was announced that PSNC, as the MIC project partner, had been invited by Microsoft to a prestigious TAP (Technology Adoption Program) cooperation framework in the scope of HPC. The HPC TAP program covers research on a new version of HPC Server 20xx - software that is intended to be distributed in 2010. The program groups, besides PSNC, e.g. such well known corporations as BMW, IBM and Siemens.
Norbert Meyer (PSNC) describes
the MIC development plans
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The next presentations were organized within separate technical sessions. The first sessions, devoted to interoperability, was started by Janusz Majchrzak (Microsoft Poland) who introduced the vision of his corporation towards the cooperation of technologies produced by different vendors. The next two speakers presented PSNC research results: first Gerard Frankowski gave a speech on security of PHP applications hosted on Microsoft platform, and then Robert Cecko, together with Marek Flejszman, showed an application able to offer access to streaming media via the Internet, accessible from many operating systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS).
During the coffee break the attendants might not only to have some snacks, but also spend their time at several stands and exhibitions. The Microsoft Robotics Studio stand with programming Lego Mindstorms robots (organized by Marcin Iwanowski), and the exhibition of PSNC 4K super-high resolution video node seemed to gather the greatest interest. Many persons were willing to see the PSNC supercomputing room and to hear about the details of Live@Edu platform. The media representatives, invited to come at noon, have much work to do as well with interviewing the speakers, the organizers and the invited guests.
Marek Zawadzki (PSNC) during
his presentation
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The session scheduled after the coffee break was devoted to virtualization. First, Marek Zawadzki (PSNC) gave a presentation on using virtualization in key Data Center scenarions. The next speaker, Bartosz Nowierski, was from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond (however a graduate of Poznań University of Technology). He spoke about the cooperation of operating systems with the Hyper-V solution.
During a one-hour lunch, served as a buffet, the PSNC supercomputing room as well as the exhibition stands, still were visited by many attendants. A contest of programming the robots with MS Robotics Studio environment was organized - Mr. Sebastian Woźniak won the contest and was given MS Visual Studio Standard software as the main prize. A separate meeting of our special guests (the representatives of universities, MIC project partners, administration entities and media), devoted to interoperability, was held as well.
Justin Alderson (Microsoft
Germany, standing) just before the presentation
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The subject of the last technical session was High Performance Computing (HPC). Two lectures were given by the Microsoft people: our guest from Microsoft Germany, Justin Alderson, and the representative of Microsoft Poland, Tomasz Kopacz. His one-hour lecture on Windows HPC Server software finished the technical part of the conference.
The conference was summarized by Dr Norbert Meyer. Its last part was collecting the survey forms from the attendants and drawing prizes among them: hardware, software, IT books, training kits, preparing to the Microsoft exams). The prizes were funded thanks to the courtesy of Microsoft Poland.
The contest of programming the robots gained much
interest
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After the conference has been finished, the stands and exhibitions were open for some time. But just as the last attendant had left the building - we still had some cleaning to do. However, we were glad because of good survey results (as soon as we prepare a detailed result sheet, it will be published on our webpage). We feel appreciated and do hope that - as wished Mr. Dariusz Piotrowski as well - we will have to arrange even a bigger room for the purposes of 4. MIC Conference the next year.
We would like to thank all participants for their attendance, and everyone who contributed to the organization of the conference for their work. See you in 2010!
We encourage you to take a look at the presentations and webcasts prepared for the conference.
Useful links:
