Registration Opens for ISC Cloud and Big Data Conferences
Registration is now open for the 2014 ISC Cloud and ISC Big Data Conferences which will be held this fall in Heidelberg, Germany. The fifth ISC Cloud Conference will take place in the Marriott Hotel from September 29 – 30 and the second ISC Big Data will be held from October 1 – 2 at the same venue.
The ISC Cloud Conference with the tagline “Cloud Meets HPC” will again be chaired by European cloud guru, Wolfgang Gentzsch who is also the driving force behind the UberCloud HPC Experiment. Some of the experiences gained from the 152 experiments conducted in various UberCloud projects since 2012 will be shared with our conference attendees.
One of the highlights of the event is the keynote talk on September 29 by Michael Resch, the Director of the Stuttgart High Performance Computing Center. Resch will be talking about “HPC and Simulation in the Cloud – How Academia and Industry Can Benefit.”
His keynote is of special interest to cloud skeptics because back in 2011, Resch, whose center provides computing resources to various industries in Southern Germany, including the car-manufacturer, Porsche, was a vocal cloud pessimist. He predicted that cloud computing was just a hype and would eventually fade away. Three years later, he feels that the cloud provides a practical option for many users whose computing needs demand convenience and versatility.
Although HPC has traditionally relied on in-house computing resources, cloud services have matured to the point where many performance-sensitive applications can now be served by this utility model. In his keynote, Resch will talk about how academic and industrial user can benefit from current cloud technologies and services. He will also present a number of projects and partnerships that highlight the potential and limitations of cloud computing in an HPC environment.
Many of the sessions at ISC Cloud will highlight real-world use cases in science and engineering, presenting the benefits, challenges, and lessons learned. A maturing cloud environment has resulted in growing adoption for a broader range of applications.
Among the topics that will be addressed at this year’s conference include:
- Hands-on tutorial: The desktop as the window to the cloud
- Real case studies from industry and research: Secrets of their successes
- Technical clouds: From lessons learned to successful solutions
- Application software providers: Making the jump to cloud computing
- Cloud R&D: The EU funds six key projects
The second ISC Big Data conference builds on the success of the inaugural 2013 event. A comprehensive program has been put together by the Steering Committee under the leadership of Sverre Jarp, who retired officially as the CTO of CERN openlab in March this year. He now holds an honorary position at CERN as part of a team that is aiming to process data at terabytes/second, as well as collecting and analyzing exabytes in a few years’ time.
The conference will present attendees with the latest developments in data-centric computing from both industry players and researchers in the domain that is now rapidly moving into a dominant position on the computing scene. While the last year’s event offered a broad focus on big data in the enterprise, this year’s conference will maintain this focus and also provide more pragmatic content for practitioners, including successful use cases, ongoing big data projects, a review of security and privacy concerns in big data, the use of visual analytics, and the rapidly increasing importance of the Internet of Things (IoT).
In addition, a series of sessions will focus on Hadoop, the well-known and rapidly evolving parallel framework for processing some of the largest datasets in the world. Enhanced or alternative frameworks, now available from a growing array of companies, will also be explored.
The keynotes lined up for the two-day conference are:
Dirk Slama, Director of Business Development, Bosch Software Innovation
Dirk Slama will convey his vision of the Internet of Things, a world in which assets, devices, machines, and cloud-based applications seamlessly interoperate, enabling new business models and services. He will discuss key success factors for IoT and present a framework that he believes will help contribute to that success.
Big Data – Successes & Challenges beyond the Hype
Stefan Wrobel, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) and Professor of Computer Science at University of Bonn
Stefan Wrobel has already published extensively on subjects in the areas of data mining and machine learning and has given several important presentations on big data topics. In his keynote, he will discuss the ways big data is currently being used in the enterprise, as well as in the broader context of society. He will also talk about the most critical issues companies face when employing big data technologies.
A special keynote from Intel, our Platinum sponsor, will also be presented. The complete program is available here. The agenda is updated regularly and a full version is expected to be available in a couple of weeks.
