SUPerG has sent out its Spring 2004 newsletter and announces the next meeting for the 3rd thru the 7th of May 2004 in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. If your hoping to get a paper submitted the abstracts are due by Dec 12th, so get cracking! This meeting will focus on Security, Data Center Simplification, HPTC & Grid Computing, and as usual, Performance Optimization & Best Practices. For details visit the SUPerG home page.

If you’ve never heard of SUPerG, read on…

SUPerG is the Sun Users Performance Group. As they put it: “SUPerG is a premiere technical forum focusing on Sun’s high-end server and storage customers in data center and high performance computing sectors. The program is designed to provide highly interactive and best practice exchanges between Sun’s leading technical experts and Sun customers.”

SUPerG has been sort of like the secret society of big hitters for years now. All the Sun performance gods are generally present (Adrian Cockcroft, Richard McDougall, Bob Larson and sometimes even Rob Snevely!). If you feel you have something to add to the world of Sun performance, this is the place to do it. Some of the presentations and papers are pretty bad (such as the 101 reasons to backup your data) so don’t think you don’t have a chance of presenting. It’s great on your resume, it’s great for your personal pride, and it’s a great way to share with everyone.

If you think you have an idea for a paper you can submit it to SUPerG@sun.com. Abstracts need to be in by Dec 12th. Acceptance notifications will go out on Jan 16th, and final papers are due on Apr 2nd. The worst that can happen as that they turn down you paper, the best is that you get to hang out with the performance gods and tell them how to tune their systems!