Francis Giraldeau

I'm living in Quebec, Canada, and I do my master degree on large scale infrastructure management for thin clients.

I worked a lot on a project called Mille-xterm. The goal is to make LTSP more suitable for large deployment. If you are interested about Mille-xterm, I suggest to read the article I wrote about it in Linux Journal of September 2006 : http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9097 .

The Mille-xterm project was experimental, but my goal is to make it mainstream. I did the integration of LTSP and Mille-xterm into Mandriva. There are some issues related to performance and security that must be resolved too. And because Mille-xterm is a kind of cluster, projects related to that are really interesting.

Background

I started a bachelor degree in electrical engineering in august 2001, at the [http://www.usherbrooke.ca Université de Sherbrooke]. Since then, I'm involved in the Linux user group [http://www.gulus.org GULUS]. I have been elected president of the group in 2003, and re-elected in fall 2006.

Back in 2001, I participate to Thin-OSCAR, a project to make disk-less clusters integrated into OSCAR. I worked at the Centre de Calcul Scientifique. Thin-OSCAR was my very first open-source project, written in Perl. There is a project on SourceForce about it. Thin-OSCAR has been used for ElixII, a 180 nodes cluster. The project is not maintained since then, but the subject is yet in the actuality. Ubuntu has the ability to boot disk-less, with NFS and unionfs, and that's pretty cool.

In 2003, We did a distribution called EduLinux. This distribution was based on Mandrake and customized for french Canadians. There was educational software installed by default. Thanks to Richard Marceau, Benoît des Ligneris and Jean-Michel Dault, the project has been a success. In total, a thousand of those CDs were sold in Schools coops. Features has been pushed into Mandrake, and the project direction was less clear. Another version, EduLinux 2004 has been produced, with more help from the community, but difference with standard Mandrake would not justify to continue the project. The project was closed in 2005.

We also did a distribution based on Mandrake to install a cluster. This distribution has been given in the OSCAR booth at Super Computing 2003, held in Phoenix, Arizona. We were able to install 128 nodes disk-less, ready to do scientific computation in less than 1h30! Well, it was cool.

I graduated in electrical engineering in December 2005. Since then, I work for [http://www.revolutionlinux.com Révolution Linux], that provide services for large scale infrastructure, principally for schools districts.

I started a master degree about Linux Terminals, related to scalability, security and performance. I will work on that topic for the next two years.

My goals

* Integrate components of Mille-xterm into LTSP and Ubuntu * Address issues about scalability for large scale Ubuntu deployments * Be involved in projects related to providing clustering tools * Become an Ubuntu developer