ISC Cloud’14 on September 29 – 30 and ISC Big Data on October 1 – 2

Heidelberg, Germany — Based on the success of the recent ISC Cloud and ISC Big Data conferences in Heidelberg, the organizers will once again conduct the conferences in tandem next fall. The ISC Cloud’14 event will be held on September 29th and 30th, followed by ISC Big Data’14 from October 1st to 2nd, again at the Heidelberg Marriott.

A diversity of use cases at ISC Cloud’13

“We see a continuous and growing interest among researchers, engineers, and service providers to participate in this event as there is no other conference that is dedicated to addressing the HPC cloud topic in such depth, and the addition of digital manufacturing into this year’s program made this year’s conference an absolute highlight,” said Wolfgang Gentzsch, the ISC Cloud’13 chair.

During the conference kick-off, Gentzsch said that the adoption of HPC in the cloud is about two years behind the enterprise cloud, but he is very optimistic about its future. Many of the presentations highlighted a range of practical use cases in research, science and engineering, demonstrating that the numbers of early adopters in the sector are on the rise.

Jason Stowe of Cycle Computing, who presented the opening keynote on the topic of HPC & Supercomputing – On Our Way towards a New Utility, reiterated Gentzsch’s optimism by demonstrating how his clients in scientific research such as pharmaceutical companies are making use of cloud services.  One such endeavor provided 10,000 core compute — hours for as little as 90 USD. Benefits like this are driving more businesses to adopt cloud-based HPC.

Held from September 23 to 24 in Heidelberg, the conference was the fourth in the series, offering a number of interesting sessions that caught the attention of 122 attendees, who came from HPC and industry. Besides the keynote by Stowe, highlights included talks by independent service providers such as the Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange, which is developing the world’s first vendor-neutral marketplace for IaaS resources. The session on engineering application software in the cloud revealed a change in the companies’ business model over the last two years, to include software service on demand.

It is worthwhile noting that one third of the conference attendees were manufacturers, particularly from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Presentations by companies such as ANSYS, Autodesk, CD-Adapco and Simulia demonstrated that the manufacturing sector recognizes the benefits of HPC in the cloud for SMEs and many are now turning to virtual “big systems” in the cloud.

Also for the first time, the conference offered a number of case studies focused on life sciences, with an emphasis on applications in hospital administration patient management, and medical research. A lively vendor panel featured nine sponsors taking a stand on various cloud issues, but interestingly defining their solutions from an end-user’s view point rather than falling back on their own product perspective.

All images captured during the ISC Cloud’13 are available on Flickr, which can be downloaded here.

ISC Big Data’13 brought together HPC and enterprise for the first time  

The inaugural ISC Big Data Conference held from September 25 to 26 in Heidelberg, Germany, right after the Cloud conference, exceeded the expectations of the organizers, attendees and most sponsors.

The two-day event generated a fascinating interaction between the HPC and the enterprise community. The first conference keynote speaker, Felix Wortmann of the University of St. Gallen & Bosch Internet of Things Lab examined how “velocity, variety and volume” — a definition coined by Gartner Research 12 years ago — create value from a business perspective.  Value creation cannot be taken for granted, and Wortmann questioned if velocity directly translates into value.

Unlike speakers from the HPC business sector and the scientific community, representatives from enterprises like SAS, British Telekom and Virgin Insights were less concerned with the volume of data and more focused on finding business solutions for their customers. Mark Torr of SAS even accused today’s businesses of being too fixated on collecting data without knowing what to do with it afterwards. In his presentation he also revealed that SAS has a keen interest in HPC as it allows them to leverage massively parallel processing to derive business benefit. Paypal’s database architect, Arno Kolster, said that HPC technology has allowed his company to do fraud detection in matter of seconds or even milliseconds.

Despite their different approaches, all the 135 attendees shared one objective: to share their big data know-how and experiences. The second keynote speaker, Flavio Villanustre of Lexis Nexis observed, “This conference achieved what no other conferences have to date: to bring the HPC and the big data parties to a common table for an open discussion on mutual collaboration and further shared research and development.”

Conference chair, Sverre Jarp of CERN, believes that this newly-established collaboration will help foster innovation as big data technologies become more widespread in organizations and critical to their missions. HPC vendors and practitioners can accelerate the commercial viability of these technologies, offering a set of solutions covering a wide range of data analytics, graph processing, visualizations, and predictive modeling.

All photos taken during ISC Big Data’14 are now available on Flickr.

About ISC Cloud’14

Organized by ISC events, the next conference will bring together researchers and engineers ­­­­­­­­from around the world to present valuable information about their own hands-on experience with focus on compute and data intensive applications in computational sciences and digital manufacturing, their resource needs in the cloud, and challenges and strategies on implementing and deploying cloud infrastructures. Please visit http://isc-events.com/ for information on the 2014 conference and other events. 

About ISC Big Data’14

Next year, ISC Big Data will focus on how value can be created in enterprises and scientific institutes alike through a meticulous focus on big data from initial capture, via high-speed processing to enlightening visualization. Hence the emphasis on ROI in big data will be maintained. A new topic will be the Internet of Things (IoT) and how it is expected to influence big data processing. Additionally, there will be a focus on security and privacy in the realm of big data. Please visit http://isc-events.com/ for information on the 2014 conference and other events.

Conference sponsorships at platinum, gold, silver and bronze levels are open for both events. Please contact Ms. Anna Schachoff at anna.schachoff@isc-events.com for more information.