We had our second Red Hat/Newcastle University research day yesterday. It was a good gathering of various people from the distributed systems research team at the University, as well as various people from JBoss, such as myself, Manki Surtani, Gary Brown and Jonathan Halliday. We had talks covering a wide range of topics, including:

• Jonathan on NoSQL, our plans and the current landscape;
• Gary on testable architectures and the Savara project, which seems to have relevance with some of the work going on within the University on electronic contracts;
• Manik on Infinispan and issues with large scale caching, which generated some interesting discussions in the room around scalability, performance and reliability.

All of these presentations were great, as usual, and lay the groundwork for interesting research collaborations in the future. It was also good to hear presentations from our University colleagues on aspects such as federated clouds and security (I was fascinated to learn about Bell-LaPadula multi-level security which seems like a good fit for cloud) as well as scalability with uncertainty (trade-offs between gossip protocols and other approaches to consensus). It also turns out that they're using a number of our JBoss projects within their work already, such as JBossAS and Drools.

It was a full day of presentations (7 in total) and much discussion. A good meeting of academic and industrial minds, where both sides learned from each other. I'm really looking forward to the collaborations that will result from this meeting and to planning the next meeting. I think next time we should schedule a couple of days though!