Grid computing is getting a fair amount of press these days. Some of you may be familiar with Sun Grid and the compute-server project on java.net.

In a technical session today, Van Simmons, Sean Merrit and James Gammill have contributed their own unique grid architecture and coining the term "Flash-Gridding" to describe it.

They claim that grid computing, in general, is too difficult. The idea behind Flash-Gridding is to reduce the need for infrastructure to a bare minimum. It needs to be easy to deploy.

Using Java to build a grid has several advantages.
It enables heterogeneous hardware and operating systems
It is transportable (supports mobile code)
It can enable the utilization of grid resources on the Internet and still be secure.
It is everywhere.

The implementation is open source and is built using GlassFish, Groovy, and Jini. If you need to do some infinite element analysis or some such you should check these guys out. I think they mentioned that they would be putting something up on the web soon (search for ComputeCycles.org).

I have been so busy with technical sessions and BOFs that today is the first chance I have had to explore the Pavilion.

Tommy is an autonomous dune buggy powered by gasoline and Java. I attended last year's presentation (talk + movie) and enjoyed it a lot, but I was pleasantly surprised this year to see Tommy in the flesh (er, I mean metal) down on the Pavilion floor. The chassis is still covered in mud from the last ordeal navigating the course during the Darpa Grand Challenge (try to catch the Nova episode on public TV, if you can).

Best of luck to Tommy and her team on the next challenge!

While I was on the Pavilion floor I stopped by the java.net booth and heard all about the Sensor Management Framework that has been developed by Bill Huynh, a student at San Francisco State University. He designed a Sensor Data Markup Language and a framework for capturing and publishing sensor data. The example he showed obtained data from NetBeams.

This is example of some of the excellent and exciting work being done by students all over the World using the Java language.