by Jim Fister, SNIA Director of Persistent Memory Enabling
Last year, the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Non-Volatile Systems Lab (NVSL) teamed with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to launch a new conference, Persistent Programming In Real Life (PIRL). While not an effort to set the record for acronyms in a conference announcement, we did consider it a side-goal. The PIRL conference was focused on gathering a group of developers and architects for persistent memory to discuss real-world results. We wanted to know what worked and what didn’t, what was hard and what was easy, and how we could help more developers move forward.
You don’t need another pep talk about how the world has changed and all the things you need to do (though staying home and washing your hands is a pretty good idea right now). But if you’d like a pep talk on sharing your experiences with persistent memory programming, then consider this just what you need.
We believe that continuing the spirit of PIRL — discussing the results of persistent memory programming in real life — should continue.
If you’re not aware, SNIA has been delivering some very popular webcasts on persistent programming, cloud storage, and a variety of other topics. SNIA has a great new webcast featuring PIRL alumni Steve Heller, SNIA CMSI co-chair Alex McDonald, and me on the SNIA NVDIMM programming challenge and the winning entry. You can find more information and check the on-demand viewing at https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/389451.
We would like to highlight more “In Real Life” topics via our SNIA webcast channel. Therefore, SNIA and UCSD NVSL have teamed up to create a submission portal for anyone interested in discussing their real-world persistent memory experiences. You can submit a topic here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe_Ypo_sf1xxFcPD1F7se02jOWrdslosUnvwyS0RwcQpWAHiA/viewform where we will evaluate your submission. Acceptable submissions will be featured in conjunction with the SNIA channel over the coming months.
As a final note, this year’s PIRL conference is currently scheduled for July. Even though most software developers are already used to social isolation and distancing from their peers, our organizing team has kept abreast of all the latest information to make a decision on the capability to do an in-person conference on that date. In our last meeting, we agreed that it would not be prudent to hold the conference on the July date, and have tentatively rescheduled the in-person conference to October 13-14 of 2020. We will announce an exact date and our criteria for moving forward on that date in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
