Sun's cutting-edge innovations is one of the reasons many universities collaborate with the vendor. British Columbia's Simon Fraser University (SFU) is an example. In a nine-minute video, Sun Staff Engineer Eric Saxe discusses SFU's collaboration with Sun on OpenSolaris with Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova, SFU assistant professor in the School of Computing Science, who shares why she believes the open source OS is a great research and teaching tool.

SFU is a public university with more than 33,000 students and 900 faculty members. SFU was ranked number one in Canada’s top Comprehensive Universities in 2008's Macleans Magazine, ranked 57th in the world and third in Canada in 2009 Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

Collaborating with Sun has been a "tremendous opportunity" for SFU, Fedorova says, because her students get access to real problems to work on, advise from technical experts and they can adjust their research so that the outcome can meet real-world needs.

According to Fedorova, OpenSolaris is an excellent research and teaching tool for many reasons. She cites its solidness as a system and its well-written, clean code as a couple of grounds. In fact, when it comes to code writing, she advises her students: "Print OpenSolaris code, frame it and hang it around the lab because it is so easy to get around it. If you want to do something new, it just takes very little time to understand where you need to go and what you need to do."

OpenSolaris also is characterized by very advanced features, she says, so when implementing extensions to the OS, "we already have a system that is very state-of-the-art and we don't have to play catch-up."

It is these same features that make OpenSolaris a great teaching tool, comments Fedorova. She names Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), CPU track that provides support for hardware counters and Sun Studio with its "wonderful" performance tools. "These features are very good for teaching the students how to understand performance of their system," she explains.

Out of the named attributes above, Fedorova identifies observability within OpenSolaris as prime in her use of it within the classroom. She shares an experience with one student in her group who had worked with other operating systems but had not experienced OpenSolaris and DTrace. She relayed that after working with the OS, the student commented that he would never use another OS again, precisely for this reason.

Support for hardware performance counters is one other aspect of OpenSolaris that Fedorova is partial to. With it being integrated in the OS versus as an after thought like so many other OSes, its easier to use and great for the classroom setting. Overall she finds OpenSolaris is a great system to demonstrate to students because some of the key achievements that have been done in the research community can be shown off.

The OpenSolaris community also draws her as an academic. She describes it as strong, passionate and an invaluable benefit for her and her students. In her experience, if a problem is encountered, all she and her students need to do is to post the issue on the OpenSolaris forum and she finds that answers are provided, often by Solaris kernel engineers. "That's extremely valuable," says Fedorova.

When asked what she'd like to see to make OpenSolaris even more beneficial to the education and research community, Fedorova said source-level debugging as a feature and suggested documentation to help professors set up a virtual lab with OpenSolaris.

More Information

OpenSolaris 2009.06 Information Resources

Sun Programs for Educators & IT Professionals

Sun in the Education Industry

Maclean's Comprehensive University Rankings

Webometrics Ranking of Canadian Universities [...read more...]

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