The Science of This Year's WWDC

Although Apple has not released all of the news slated for the keynote, the company has already announced that the next version of Mac OS X, nicknamed Tiger, will be unveiled at the gathering. Other treats in store for attendees will be the announcement of winners of a developer contest and several informal events, said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of worldwide developer relations, in an interview with MacNewsWorld.

The WWDC will feature seven tracks and almost 200 technical sessions, including a special session called, "Apple and Scientific Computing," that will cover the ways that Apple products are driving momentum in scientific markets.

Blinding You with Science

Apple is promoting the scientific sessions by pointing out the advances in scientific computing that have been made recently, such as the large, complex cluster installations like Virginia Tech's system, "X."

Also, the company has indicated that the debut of Xgrid will also be of interest to the scientific community.

Aberdeen analyst Peter Kastner told MacNewsWorld that Xgrid has found a solid foothold at universities. He noted that, as companies begin serious contemplation of grid computing, the Xgrid will be worth watching in the marketplace.

As part of the conference, Apple will also be announcing the winners of "The Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics Award Program." For the award, Apple sought five of America's most innovative scientific research projects that would benefit from a computational cluster.

Each award recipient will receive a four-node Apple Workgroup Cluster. The winners will be announced on June 29.

Okamoto said that the special focus on the scientific community is not surprising, given how Apple is expanding well into that market. "At a recent biotech conference, I noticed that most people were using PowerBooks," he said. "That's just an indication that Apple is being used in multiple disciplines. Because of that, the developers for those disciplines will be at WWDC."

Developer Nirvana

Okamoto noted that the Apple developer conference is unique from similar events at other companies. "The Apple engineering community is very diverse," he said. "That makes it cool."

He said that one of the most enjoyable aspects of the conference is to walk down the hallways and see scores of developers just sitting with their laptops open, chatting with each other about computing topics.

The diversity of those hallway denizens has been increased since the advent of OS X. "We've been doing things within the developer community that have increased the number of developers we see interested in Apple," Okamoto noted. "Especially in the scientific and technical community, there is a lot of new attention for us."

Fresh Talent

IDC analyst Roger Kay told MacNewsWorld that, in general, conferences such as Apple's WWDC are crucial for revealing technology to developers. "It's a good way to focus their efforts," he said. "It shows them where to take things."

He added that Apple has worked especially hard to woo developers. "Apple's issue is always to keep their developers interested in the platform.".

That goal has been easier with the conversion of the code base to Unix, which brought in developers that previously had never considered working with Apple. Drawing these developers, as well as monitoring the scientific community, may be a boon for Apple as high-performance computing evolves.

"The scale of the industry is so much bigger than it ever has been," Kay said. "It makes sense that Apple would work to attract as many developers as they can."