biocluster seminar / gathering ( was Re: [Bioclusters] cluster hardware question )

[Chris Dagdigian]

I see Chris Dwan is being his usual modest self :)

Ognen raised a good point -- this biocluster list now has 452 members 
and has sustained some pretty good signal-to-noise ratios. This list may 
almost at the critial mass where we could consider trying to organize 
local/regional getherings, pub nights or even 'tour my biocluster!' type 
events.

We are not at the size where we could pull off any sort of standalone 
bioclusters meeting or conference though -- open-bio.org has thousands 
of mailing list subscribers and we still have to organize our 
'bioinformatics open source (BOSC)' conference as a side meeting of the 
much larger ISMB conference in order to get a sizable attendence.

Our best bet may be to try to get together regionally or perhaps try to 
organize a BOF day or side meeting at some other event that we'd be 
travelling to anyway. Some suggestions as to where biocluster people may 
be found; let me know if I've left some out:

o ISMB (hardcore bioinformatics meeting - next one is in australia)
o Linuxworld
o LISA/SAGE/USENIX meetings
o O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference
o BioITWorld Expo
o IEEE cluster meetings

BioTeam Inc. aka www.bioteam.net (me, Michael Athanas & Bill Van Etten) 
are based in Boston and can probably talk Wyeth Research, Tufts 
University (hi Andy!) or Harvard University into providing meeting 
facilities for a 1/2 day. Harvard may be the best bet as there are a 
bunch of large and small clusters scattered all over the university and 
medical school. Perhaps we can do something around the time of 
BioITWorld Expo in Boston which is in March 2003.

On the west coast I'll be at the upcoming OReilly conference 
(http://conferences.oreillynet.com/bio2003/)  in San Diego from Feb 
3-6th. At the last ORA 2002 Biocon meeting in Arizona myself, Andy Fant, 
Joe Landman, Matthew Trunnel, Glenn Otero and many others held a mini 
birds-of-a-feather gathering that was very interesting/informative. If 
there are enough of us going to San Diego perhaps we can try for a 
repeat event. I'll buy the first round at the pub...


BTW- I'm in Singapore right now working on a very cool biocluster 
project. More details & pictures soon, I promise. Various PR and 
institution types need to be consulted before we can talk in public 
about what exactly we are doing here.

-Chris









Chris Dwan (CCGB) wrote:
>>I could look into hosting something like a 1-day seminar in Kansas City.
>>Who would be interested in coming to give a talk/answer questions?
> 
> 
> I would love to be there in both roles, but at least as a listener.
> I'm certain that I could learn a lot from the Bioteam folks, as well
> as Joe Landman.
> 
> My expertise is not so much with hardware, but with the user
> interactions with the system.  It turns out that there is a lot of
> thinking left to do after the cluster is up and running, and ready to 
> receive jobs.
> 
> -Chris Dwan
>  Center for Computational Genomics & Bioinformatics
>  University of Minnesota