8:30 – 9:30      Registration and Continental Breakfast

 9:30 – 10:30    Career Challenges and Opportunities in Today’s World of Technology

                        Speaker:  Tim Exendine, BMC

 

Today’s IT environment offers a never-ending variety of challenges and opportunities to those individuals who are drawn to technology.  Tim’s presentation will provide us with some thoughts on how to navigate the rough waters of IT from a career perspective.

 

10:45 – 11:45 Quantitative Evaluation of SPEC Component-Level Benchmarks

Speaker: Jozo Dujmovic, San Francisco State University

 

Jozo will present a systematic evaluation of the most popular SPEC benchmark suites. His goal is to show that SPEC component-level benchmarks need to be evaluated from the standpoint of redundancy and completeness, and that such procedures can be efficiently used for tuning of existing benchmark suites and reducing the cost of benchmarking.  This paper was presented at CMG last November.

 

11:45 ‑ 12:30  NCCMG Business Meeting/Lunch

 

12:30– 1:15     Mainframe Software Asset Management – What’s the Big Deal?

                        Speaker Don Murray, NCCMG Director

 OK, mainframe software asset management isn’t a technical topic, but it is an important one from a cost management perspective, and applies equally as well to the midrange environment.  Don’s presentation will show how important it is to have qualified people to manage and provide support to those in Software Asset Management.

 

1:30– 2:30       10 Completely Obvious Tuning Tips

                        Speaker Denise Kalm, Kalm Kreative, Inc.

In a tough economic cycle, everyone is getting back to basics and focusing on the fundamentals.  And as our work lives get more complex, it can be easy to get buried in the details and bemused by technical wizardry and advances.  But the basic rules in performance really haven’t changed, and apply whether you are enjoying the mainframe renaissance, playing in Linux or managing any other server.  Let’s get back to tuning basics in this session.

 

“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”

Edward R. Murrow

 

Perhaps you are just starting out in the field of performance.  Or you may be an experienced pro who has forgotten more than most people learn.  Either way, sometimes, it is a good idea to go back to basic rules of thumb – the KPRs or Kalm Performance Rules.  Based on 30 years of experience, these are the tried and true fundamentals that worked for me.  And when I got stuck, they were the rules I went back to, time and again, because the solution was always inherent in these rules.  Think you know it all? Remember what Stephen Hawking said.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”

 

“There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”
Nelson Mandela