Alumni Research Talks (ART) 1.0 was organised on 13th - 15th January, 2012. Sponsored by Google and NetApp , this edition of ART was lined up with several recent graduates working in field of supercomputers to spftware development, and helped in connecting BITSian students with different experts in recent fields of computer science.
Natthu: Virtualization Natthu- Mostly known as the first BITSian to start his career at facebook introduced himself as a “Jack of few trades and master of nothing, with two masters degrees though”. His talk during a slightly lazy Sunday afternoon was aimed at explaining the intricacies of Virtualisation. Since most of the attendees knew nothing about Virtualization, Natthu, quite understandably took it upon himself to explain Virtualization from the basics; starting from its definition, its classifications and moving on to the finer details. BITSians could connect more to the talk considering that Natthu time and again used anecdotes from his own BITSian life: PS2, courses, (the problem of playing FIFA on linux) etc to make his point. He further highlighted the on-going research in the field telling more about his own work and the research going on in Georgia Tech-from where he just graduated. Those who were genuinely interested could be seen taking notes and enthusiastically applauding at the end of the lecture. The others, well, did just the latter.
Year of graduation – 2010
There are people who are witty and then there are people who are termed geeks. Prasanta on the other hand presented to us, the best of both worlds. The surprisingly hilarious guy not only talked about ICT4D( Information and Communication Technologies for Development) and what and how it does what it does, he also managed to give the much eager BITSian junta a taste of social entrepreneurship by explaining how getting rich and helping people can be done both serially and in parallel, giving necessary and sufficient real life examples for both.
Year of graduation – 2011
Yeah! So, now 'Supercomputers' is not just a celebrated word for the BITSians, Swapnil was actually not only able to dissect the topic to an extent comprehensible to every layman present in the 5105, but also added the much required recreation to his 'about to be no-nonsense lecture' by introducing trivia questions after every 10 slides or so. Having browsed through the building blocks of a supercomputer like its architecture, topologies, memory and programming models, he explained it's applications which ranged from gene sequencing and protein folding to The Big-Bang theory and search for the extra-terrestrial. Having done his major background work on parallel computing, he also elucidated on it's pitfalls. Talking about the supercomputers like Blue Waters and Japanese K computer, he suggested possibilities of having supercomputers faster than human brain sometime in near future. The lecture concluded with description of future challenges like memory and I/O latency bottlenecks for supercomputers, power and energy consumption, convergence of programming models and the research efforts currently undertaken in US and India.
Year of graduation – 2010
The fourth lecture during Alumni Research talks was conducted by a recent BITS graduate and ex-CSA member: Vineet Pandey. Following the brilliant talk on supercomputing, Vineet asked for a 10 min break for the audience to recharge their batteries and ensured that the intensity levels were maintained for the next hour or so. After preliminary publicity of his company NetApp, he kick started the lecture with a brief overview of what the talk will be about. It centred on two things majorly: The future of data storage enterprise and the theoretical challenges presented by Flash. Since the talk was aimed at everyone, it started with the basics of flash drives; right from their market to the electronic structure of the drives. He explained later on the finer technical details of flash drives and their advantages over the conventional hard disks. Having done a thesis in the Seoul national university on ‘Indexing structures for Flash based memory drives’, Vineet explained his thesis to the audience relating it with his present topic of the talk. Given the theoretical nature of the topic Vineet tried his best to keep the audience interested with questions and jokes sprinkled throughout the talk. Moreover the slides themselves were filled with a number of links and papers giving more avenues of further reading to the interested. Vineet concluded telling the audience about recent start-ups in this area and specifically pointing out the research possibilities in Flash memory.
Year of graduation – 2011