As both Amazon and Google start opening up their infrastructure to outside parties, the phrase on everyone’s lips is cloud computing. Systems like EC2 (from Amazon) and Hadoop (open source implementation of Google’s tools) are making the construction of scalable, distributed architectures ever easier. Virtual hardware is becoming so much of a commodity that you can order up any chunk of processing power or storage, specifically catered to your needs. Now’s your chance to get up close and personal and learn all about this new wave of distributed computing.

Aaron Kimball is a PhD student at UW and a consultant on scalable Hadoop systems. He’ll be speaking at the Google campus in Fremont on cloud computing, and some of the search giant’s specific implementations. The event is unfortunately already at capacity… but you can email the WTIA directly to get on the mailing list.