Normal intro

● What time is it?

● Coordinated to their own unique solar noons
● The spread of railroads made it essential to coordinate times for train schedules
● Scientists became preoccupied with finding an absolute time
● Did it by studying atomic theory and the earth’s rotation

Name
● OUTLINE - WHAT YOU’LL TALK ABOUT

Explaining the cloud

● There’s no simple definition of the cloud
● It is a global network of servers
● When engineers were drawing network diagrams, when they wanted to indicate a
connection to the internet they drew a cloud
● Using a device to that connects to the internet to access data that isn’t stored directly on
your hard drive you’re interacting with the cloud
○ If you’ve used Netflix, Google Drive, Youtube, Dropbox, you’ve interacted with
the cloud

Virtual machines
● Virtual machine - a whole computer, but instead of running on hardware it’s running on
the internet (the cloud!)
○ Computer within a computer
● I’ve been learning how to work with virtual machines - especially using computer
languages like UNIX
○ Using programs on these virtual machines to perform experiments testing how
well large networks of computer systems and routers communicate with each
other when they move around.
○ In the lens of APL, this is important for communications in the military, like
comms and on battlefields

Timekeeping in the cloud

● Now, back to what I discussed in my intro
● Designing an experiment to see how well different cloud servers keep time
● This is the main project, and something we are planning to start experimentally after
break
● Currently developing the experimental design but we don’t have it finished yet
● My mentor, partner, and I plan to publish a paper on our experimental results
● That project will have ramifications

My experience
● My time on site so far has definitely had a learning curve, I didn’t really know anything
about cloud computing when I started
○ Learned UNIX to work with the virtual machines
○ Writing some code in Python right now which I only have a little experience in
● The program we’re working with is pretty buggy - so the work involves a lot of
troubleshooting and doubling back without being sure if something really works
○ It’s good problem solving practice
● I have a research partner and work directly with my mentor a lot