[TriLUG-announce] August 13th: Mark McCahill on Linux Containers for Learning

[Jack Hill]

Hi all,

Please join us for our August talk by Mark McCahill. I've heard him speak 
on this topic before and it promises to be a demo of some pretty cool 
technology. Please let us know on this list or at steering at trilug.org if 
you have any questions or concerns. I look forward to seeing everyone. 
Details are below.

Best,
Jack

Topic: Linux Containers for Learning
Presenter: Mark McCahill
When: Thursday, 13 August 2015 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Where: Bandwidth, Venture III, 900 Main Campus Dr, Raleigh, NC 27606
Parking: Venture Center Deck, adjacent to Venture III on Venture Center Way (visitor spaces are unrestricted after 5pm) 
<http://osm.org/go/ZYRUokxgI--?m=>

Synopsis

Duke University provides access to a wide variety of Linux applications, 
for student projects, teaching, and research. Besides provisioning 
hundreds of traditional Linux VM's each semester, Duke is taking advantage 
of emerging container technologies to host applications.

This presentation will explore a few of the technologies and tools Duke 
has used for application delivery, including the 350 Ubuntu containers 
running on Docker that host R and RStudio for statistics courses, and the 
noVNC/OpenBox solution used to embed X Windows applications in users' Web 
browsers. (Source code for some of this technology will be available on 
GitHub.) It will also discuss more generally the strategy and the 
tradeoffs involved in providing virtualized applications - especially when 
you have to give sudo access to students.

Bio

Mark McCahill works at Duke University's Office of Information Technology, 
as an architect for e-learning and collaborative systems. He was involved 
in the development and popularization of early Internet technologies - 
most notably at the University of Minnesota, where he led the team that 
developed Gopher. He is also interested in virtual worlds, developing the 
GopherVR system for organizing Gopher information spatially, and serving 
as an architect of the Croquet project.