Seattle is not so different than Boston, both are a typical American metros, both have some waterbody and both are big. Execpt that it rains a lot in Seattle and there are noticeably many homeless in Seattle. Public transport has good connectivity, but its necessary to make sure you have change before boarding a bus. Starbucks is at every nook and corner of the city, unsurpringly enough, since it was founded here.

Here for a conference and Workshop, OSDI and HotDep, by the courtesy of USENIX Travel Grant. The conference is amazing so far. The attendee list is almost who's who of the OS research including Andrew Tannenbaum and many professors and industry people whose homepage I've visited at some point. Its good to have all such people under one roof brainstorming. Undoutably, its motivating to talk and meet with such people and get inputs on the current hot topics in OS and about the filesystems topics that I'm exploring. It feels good when people already knows about your thesis research even before you tell them about it :) But at the same time it makes you feel all the more responsible for putting extra efforts in your work.

Being a premier OS conference, talks at OSDI are always interesting, and this year was no exception. Most noticeable was "Rethink the Sync," which talked about achieving performance closer to asynchronous I/O but with synchronous guarantees. Among others was one describing virtual memory model for garbage collected applications called CRAMM and OS profiling and state monitoring tool called "Flight Data Recorder."

On day 2, most influential talk was about how Google manages its data storage by a storage system called Bigtable. It gave a birds eye view of the work, but was good enough to let the audience know what it is. There were huge questions everyone had about this...and unsurprisingly the first one to question was a guy from Yahoo :)

With a quick lunch I managed to take some time off to wander around the Seattle downtown. Of course after taking care of the homework that I had to turn in today ;) Conference hotel being at the heart of downtown, every area of the downtown was reachable and I could lay my hands on some stuff for the home coming 2006. Its called the "Public Market Center" and is no different than the camp's fashion street of Pune minus the chaos. Most shops also were speciality stores, like having antiques or some having arabic goods, all wooden decoratives or some even having just black magic stuff!

Evening was spent at the Museum of Flight, which is a Paul Allen's own toy room, so the evening was sponsored by Microsoft and turned out that the USENIX luncheon was better than the dinner :| Along being a museum of flight, it also hosts Leonardo da Vinci's museum. It had nice little models that leonardo had thought about during his 67 years of life, making him greatest of inventor ever! His 13,000 pages of written work is incomparable to the all OSDI-like conference proceedings combined ;)

Sleep calling..