CSTC and SSTC Joint Meeting – Seattle – April 2009
AIAA Computer Systems and Software Systems TCs
Joint Meeting
Infotech@Aerospace Conference
Seattle, WA
April 7-8, 2009
Two meetings were held this week. The first, on Tuesday night was the shorter with the focus on new members and plug and play. The second, on Wednesday night, was our main business meeting.
The Tuesday meeting was attended by members Joe Marshall, Rao Mannepalli, Jim Lyke, Jim Paunicka, Terry Morris, Stephen Blanchette, Fred Briggs, Nick Sramek, Neil Pignatano, Ron Kohl and Mike Rahmatipour. We had three guests: Bruce Amato from BAA, Tom Merendino from CMU/SEI and George Cancro from JHU/APL.
On Wednesday, Jim Lyke and Terry Morris were not with us. However we were joined by Tom Woodall, Jim Smith and Lyle Long as well as Jim Rankin, the 2010 Infotech General Chair.
Betty Guillie from AIAA stopped by Tuesday and told us about the ribbons available for name badges for TC Members and Session Chairs. She also handed out leather AIAA TAC wallets and told us she had mugs and t-shirts available. Betty is our liaison with TAC.
Joe led the meeting on Tuesday. Introductions were made and the agenda was reviewed. Joe went through a set of charts derived from the TC Brochure and finished with a bubble chart showing how the flow of ideas and products to and from the TCs. These are shown in the attached Tuesday night charts. There were various discussions on the requirements to be a TC member.
Ron Kohl gave a presentation on the history and future plans for the COTS Guidebook. This included a list of potential updates and elicited significant discussion from our potential new members.
Joe logged into the new TC websites and showed what we would have within the next month as soon as it got loaded.
Jim Lyke, a new member of the CSTC, gave a brief history and summary of the efforts of the Space Plug and Play Avionics and similarities he has seen between this and the needs in other areas such as medical instruments. He also described new efforts such as mapping plug and play to small satellites such as the Cubesats popular with many universities. He described his experiences with trying to get the AIAA to support him and we discussed how the TCs can review but not write the standards that are needed. A lot of discussion pursued on the need for a foundation or some organization to manage the various standards and other data elements needed to create seven day spacecraft. Jim volunteered to populate the Plug and Play areas of the CSTC website. Joe has created both a shared library and a Wiki page structure for the plug and play effort. He is working with the AIAA to establish procedures to grant access to collaborators outside of the TC.
On Wednesday night, the meeting was run by the TC co-chairs, Lyle Long and Tom Woodall. After introductions, Joe (with Ron’s help) reviewed the previous night’s meeting’s activities.
Kyril Faenov from the Microsoft High Performance Computing Group gave a presentation on Microsoft’s HPC Server product line. He was especially pleased to show that a data center in Shanghai had achieved the #10 spot this year running the Microsoft HPC 2008 Server software. This tool can go on anything from a desktop workstation to a full supercomputing facility and scales well. Their product supports rather seamless operation with all Microsoft Products. He showed how formulas in a large Excel spreadsheet can be targeted to multiple nodes in a cluster allowing higher performance calculations. His charts are included in this meeting’s folder.
Tom, Lyle and Jim Rankin described the 4.5 hour Information Systems Group Meeting that made a single decision – to go forward with an exhibit-less Infotech 2010 in Atlanta next April. Attendance was down 25% but was in line with experience with other conferences AIAA has put on recently. There will only be 7 parallel tracks (instead of 10) as Unmanned Unlimited will not co-locate with us. They will however still supply papers from the UAV area. The conference will run three days instead of 3.5. There was a lot of discussion of what could help round out the program. Lyle and Jim Rankin are going to look into coordinating standards activities. Joe and Tom will represent CSTC and Rao and Lyle will represent SSTC. Jim Smith is one of three Technical Chairs for 2010.
Joe asked that we begin working our list of session chairs and topics as abstracts will be due in August for Infotech 2010. Those volunteering to run sessions so far are Ron (Software Maintenance), Rao, Ken, Neil (Fault Tolerance and/or ORS), Lyle, Joe and Mike (Software V&V). Joe will setup a SharePoint folder and possibly other structure to work these over the next several months. It was also mentioned we should reach out for more student papers, especially from the universities within driving distance of Atlanta.
We also discussed the current conference, putting together a special issue for JACIC and whether presentations could be made available. Joe will send a note to all authors who published / presented to gauge interest and see if presentations can be obtained.
Looking forward to the ASM conference in 2010, it was announced that abstracts are due 6/3/2009 for those interested in submitting a paper. Each TC sponsors a session at the ASM which will be in Orlando again in January 2010.
Joe took some time and brought up the new AIAA websites and illustrated the capabilities we now have access to. Two missing areas are multiple file uploads and drag and drop. All TC Members will be given Contributor Access to their TC’s website and Full Read Access to the other website. Look for messages announcing your ID in the next week. Joe is working on several issues of access with the AIAA and some members have not been granted access.
Tom handed out the new brochures and asked that members remember to bring these to other conferences they go to as a recruiting tool. We made these available in the common area of Infotech as our first usage.
Ron repeated his discussion of the COTS Guidebook from the night before (charts are included in the folder). Ron has received permission to send a note to all people who have purchased or downloaded the guidebook asking for comments or upgrades they would like to see. Ron showed the current list of topic changes/additions based on previous feedback and effort closure and will send this list out to all TC members of both TCs. He is looking for authors to attempt to write/change the sections he is showing. If he doesn’t have an author, that section will not get written. He would like to get first section drafts in the Fall and have a first integrated document by year end. An area of the SSTC website will be set up for collaboration on the updated Guidebook.
Ron made a short conceptual presentation on the potential need for a Software Maintenance Guidebook. These charts are attached and are based partially on the results of his Session on Tuesday morning.. He plans to follow-up on this with potential interested parties to see if a new effort is warranted.
We discussed the upcoming annual highlights article for the year end Aerospace America. Stephen will head this for the SSTC. Tom is searching for and will identify a volunteer for the CSTC article. All members should consider anything of interest that could be included in the year end article.
The Software Systems Award was given out at the Award Luncheon on Wednesday. Tom described that the CSTC and Sensor Systems TC now have a set of procedures for selecting the award. Now we just need nominations. Nomination packages should be assembled on the AIAA website and completed by July 1st so this award can be given at the 2009 DASC.
We discussed the location for the next TC meeting and it was decided to have it in the LA area in conjunction with the Space 2009 conference, though not necessarily at the conference site – we may consider using the AIAA West office if available. This is the week of September 14-18. Tom will research and share information on the rooms and we will discuss further at the following telecons. We will also reach out to possible tour at JPL or at the Long Beach Port Authority.
Nick will send the old list of other Liaisons to Lyle for updates by our members.
There was discussion about the current state of aerospace education at universities and the need to teach a better, more information centric approach to students. This may lead to a position paper in the future. Lyle will spearhead any efforts here.
The Stir the Pot award was given by Jim Smith (January winner) to Ben Calloni. Jim will mail the award to Ben at his earliest convenience.
On Thursday afternoon, Joe, Jim Smith and Lyle attended the Infotech wrap-up meeting and 2010 planning meeting. 332 people attended the conference which had 64 technical sessions and 7 panel/workshops. A total of 239 papers and oral presentations were in the final program though only 213 papers were actually uploaded. University papers made up a majority of the submitted papers. We reviewed a survey that will be sent to all attendees.
Most of the meeting was spent going over what went right and wrong and what needs to be fixed in 2010. Elizabeth Carter from AIAA indicated that presentations from the Plenaries and Luncheon speakers may become available in the near future.
AIAA should settle on the hotel by late April and the call for papers should be out by May 1.
Recorded by Joe Marshall
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