Feeling @Home with Windows Azure, at Home
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months working with and talking about Windows Azure to a variety of audiences, but if you’re anything like me, it can be hard to truly ‘get it’ until you touch it. So to bring it all home (pun intended), my colleagues Brian Hitney, John McClelland, and I have been working on a pretty cool virtual event.
@Home with Windows Azure, is a two-hour webcast, which we’ll be repeating over the next couple of months, through which we’ll cover many of the core components of Windows Azure in a rather unique context; this is not your father’s “Hello World” experience!
The application we’ll be building leverages Stanford University’s Folding@home project. Folding@home is a distributed computing application, where participants donate spare cycles of their own machines (at home, get it?) to running simulations of protein folding .
Protein folding refers the process by which proteins assemble themselves to perform specific functions, like acting as enzymes or antigens. When things go wrong, diseases and conditions such as Alzheimer’s and cystic fibrosis can result, so understanding why things go wrong is critical to advancing treatment and finding cures. Protein folding though is a very compute-intensive operation, and simulating just a nanosecond of folding activity can take as much as a day of CPU time!
That’s where Windows Azure comes in. During these sessions we’ll walk through the steps to build a cloud application that will use Azure compute instances to contribute to the Folding@home project. Registrants will get a no-strings-attached, two-week Azure account as part of the deal, so you’ll have a chance to build your own Azure application and contribute to medical science – how cool is that!
9 opportunities! Register by phone or on-line
Click on the Event ID to register today,
or call 877-673-8368 and reference the Event ID below
Wednesday |
April 28 |
11:00 AM – 01:00 PM |
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Tuesday |
May 04 |
07:00 PM – 09:00 PM |
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Wednesday |
May 12 |
11:00 AM – 01:00 PM |
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Wednesday |
May 19 |
04:00 PM – 06:00 PM |
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Wednesday |
May 26 |
11:00 AM – 01:00 PM |
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Tuesday |
June 01 |
11:00 AM – 01:00 PM |
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Wednesday |
June 09 |
04:00 PM – 06:00 PM |
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Wednesday |
June 16 |
11:00 AM – 01:00 PM |
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Wednesday |
June 23 |
07:00 PM – 09:00 PM |
Comments
Anonymous
April 24, 2010
Is this also on demand somewhere? I'm at work during that time :/Anonymous
April 24, 2010
Sven, we did try to vary the times a bit, but it's definitely an East Coast US bias. We are planning to record one of the sessions, but probably NOT the first :)Anonymous
April 28, 2010
Jim, Thanks to you and your associates for creating this event. I know it was a lot of work to prepare and I appreciate what you did. I just finished the event and did some follow up work to get the app deployed. The folding app is deployed to the Windows Azure cloud, but I don't see my client on the team status page. Is there any way to tell if it is really working? Regards, Michael SchulzAnonymous
April 28, 2010
Thanks for the feedback Michael. The default configuration is a 15 minute ping interval, so it will be that long after deploying before you see anything. If you visit http://<yourapp>.cloudapp.net, you'll be directed to a status page of your roles, and if you go to http://distributed.cloudapp.net and the Status or Visual tab you should eventually see yours running... if not let me know and we'll troubleshoot