ISC Cloud, Big Data Convergence in Heidelberg

The fourth ISC’13 Cloud Conference will take place in the Marriott Hotel, Heidelberg, Germany from September 23 – 24 and the inaugural ISC’13 Big Data Conference will be held at the same venue immediately afterward, from September 25 – 26.

As the cloud computing model is proving to be the useful match for big data, i.e. providing virtually unlimited resources on demand, many topics and presentations in both conference programs will reflect on that connection.

ISC Cloud’13 – HPC and Manufacturing Meet Cloud

In his opening keynote titled “HPC and Supercomputing – On our Way towards a New Utility”, Jason Stowe, the CEO of Cycle Computing, will be talking about what will happen when scientists and researchers are no longer limited by fixed-size compute and data capacity.  His presentation will explore how organizations are running large-scale HPC workloads, using high performance and high throughput utility computing. Several real-world examples will be offered, including Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Pacific Life Insurance, Schrödinger, and others. Based upon these case studies, Stowe will discuss trends that could forever change how computational science is performed.

This year’s cloud conference will also focus on digital manufacturing. The ISC Cloud Chair, Wolfgang Gentzsch commenting on this emerging area said, “Small and medium-size companies will really benefit from this conference. Their desktop computers are limited in cpu power and memory size. But early adopters today are already overcoming these limits by bursting into a CAE or Bio Cloud. Half of our speakers will present their use cases from digital manufacturing.”

The full program is available on the Cloud website.

ISC Big Data – Where Enterprise and HPC Meet

Following the cloud conference, scientists and business leaders will come together to discuss big data in the enterprise, science and other domains based on success stories and real-life case studies.

Two exciting keynotes have been lined up for September 25 and 26 to give the attendees an expansive perspective of the big data field.

In the first keynote, “Big Data – Hype or Disruptive Innovation?,”  Prof. Dr. Felix Wortmann,  Assistant Professor of Technology Management at University Sankt Gallen in Switzerland, will  offer a reality-check on the big data phenomenon.  Data-intensive computing and analytics have been around for decades, built on a 20-year technology base encompassing business analytics, data warehousing, and HPC. But three years ago the big data juggernaut took off, promising tremendous value from recently commercialized technologies like MapReduce, high performance file systems, in-memory databases, and enterprise-grade solid state disks (SSDs). So is “big data” just a new catch phrase for a set of evolving solutions or does it represent a fundamental step-change for the industry?

In the second keynote, Flavio Villanustre, vice president of technology architecture and product at LexisNexis, will offer an industry perspective in his talk, “HPC and Data Intensive Computing: The Road to Convergence.” From his perspective, big data technologies are linking the disparate worlds of HPC and enterprise computing.  As a result, he believes that these two domains are blurring and will now be able leverage each other in exciting new ways.  In a second keynote, Dr. Chaitanya Baru, a distinguished scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center will present the Big Data Top100, a new initiative to rank systems based on a data-centric benchmark.

The conference will also feature talks on predictive analytics for high energy physics, the use of Hadoop at British Telcom, Google’s solutions for big data, and how CERN and EMBL are dealing with the data deluge. Other conference highlights include sessions on vendor platforms built for big data and scalable big data architectures. A panel discussion will top off the event, bringing together some of the key speakers from the conference.

The ISC’13 Cloud Big Data Kickoff

To celebrate the introduction of the new conference series and the success of the fourth cloud conference, ISC Events will host an ISC Cloud Big Data BBQ during ISC’13 on June 19. The BBQ will take place 6 – 8 p.m. at Marché Messehof. This get together will also help attendees to talk business and make new contacts in a relaxed atmosphere.