Introducing the ISC Think Tank Series, sponsored by HPCwire "Today's Realities and Challenges of HPC in the Cloud."
The idea for producing the series stems from ideas exchanged between the ISC events team and HPCwire, official ISC'11 Platinum Media Partner, to establish a "meeting of the minds" between the thought leaders across HPC in discussions revolving around controversial and provocative topics that are impacting the HPC community today.
By capturing the thoughts, ideas, and opinions expressed by the panelists live on video, our goal is to continue to enhance the value of our ISC LIVEwire Special Feature coverage for you, our readers through leveraging our community, partner, and industry relationships to form an annual alumni event that we will continue to build upon each year. This is another way in which we will continue to bring value to the community with news and information relevant to the worlds of high performance and cloud computing.
The sessions were filmed during ISC'11 in front of a live audience at the CCH-Congress Center Hamburg.
I encourage everyone to take a few minutes to check out the videos or tune in to the audio. As always, we like to hear from you and your comments and insights are always welcome. Now, on to the show. Please sit back, relax and enjoy.
Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Full Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) & Member of the Board of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) (Moderator)
Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller is professor of computer science at GUP, who has worked in parallel computing and computer graphics since 1993 with a special focus on parallel programming and debugging and cluster and grid computing. He has participated in several national and international research projects and has co-authored more than 150 scientific papers in journals, and conference proceedings. He is deputy head of the institute, appointed national representative of Austria in the EU e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (eIRG), Area Director Applications of the Open Grid Forum (OGF), and a member of the Austrian Grid Executive Board. Furthermore he is leading the EGI_DS Project as Project Director since September 2007. Before EGI, he served as the Deputy Project Director of the EU Project EGEE at CERN.
Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, Director of the OGF Open Grid Forum, and Advisor to the EU project DEISA on Distributed European Initiative for Supercomputing Applications (Moderator)
Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch is a senior consultant for HPC, Grid and Cloud Computing and the General Chairman of the ISC Cloud Conference Series. Previously, he was an Advisor to the EU funded project DEISA, the Distributed European Initiative for Supercomputing Applications, and he directed the 3-year German Government funded $150 Mio D-Grid Initiative for developing a sustainable Grid infrastructure for research and industry in Germany. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the OGF Open Grid & Cloud Forum standards organization, and a member of the US President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, PCAST. He founded the e-School Project which aims at building and operating a professional interactive Web 2.0 computer simulation laboratory for K-20 science and engineering education and edutainment.
Before, Wolfgang was a professor of computer science and mathematics at several universities in the US and in Germany, and held leading positions at the MCNC Grid and Data Center, Sun Microsystems, Gridware, Genias, and the DLR German Aerospace Research Center. Wolfgang studied mathematics and physics at the Technical University in Aachen, and got his PhD in numerical methods for partial differential equations.
Tom Tabor, CEO and Publisher, Tabor Communications Inc. (Moderator)
Tom Tabor has over 33 years experience in business-to-business publishing, including 23 years focused on High Performance Computing (HPC), cloud computing and more recently, advanced digital manufacturing technologies.
As an internationally recognized pioneer in the electronic publishing industry, Tom is credited with introducing the first online publication in the early nineties, HPCwire. Over the years, he has served as publisher for the award-winning Supercompting Review magazine, WEBster, HPCwire, On-Demand Enterprise, GRIDtoday, High Performance Computing - Contributions to Society, and The Emergence of Grid and Service-Oriented IT, as well as producing the GT04 tradeshow and conference, and a series of Grid VIP Summits worldwide.
In addition to his role as Publisher for Digital Manufacturing Report, Tom is currently President and CEO of Tabor Communications, Inc. (TCI). TCI is a leading international media, advertising, and communications company that provides solutions, news and information to the HPC, cloud, and digital manufacturing communities.
Dan Reed, Corporate Vice President of Technology Policy and Strategy and leader of the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) Microsoft (Industry Panelist)
Dan heads Microsoft's Technology Strategy and Policy (TS&P) and Extreme Computing Group (XCG). TS&P helps shape Microsoft's long-term vision and strategy for technology innovations and the company's associated policy engagement with governments and institutions around the world. In turn, XCG unifies Microsoft research and incubation efforts to develop radical new approaches to computing hardware, and reliable, secure cloud infrastructure and exascale software systems.
The XCG charter is to rethink the nature of computing at extreme scale, from alternative, quantum computing models, through the transformative effects of manycore parallelism on programming systems and architectures, through massive cloud computing infrastructure designs that drive consumer, business and social applications.
Previously, Dan was the founding director of the Renaissiance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, the Chancellor's Eminent Professor, and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Before that, I was head of the Department of Computer Science, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
Dan have served as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA).
HPC Architect, Office of the CTO, VMware, USA With over 20 years of experience in High Performance Computing, Josh currently leads an effort at VMware to bring the full value of virtualization to HPC. Previously, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems with broad responsibilities for HPC direction and strategy. He joined Sun in 1996 from Thinking Machines Corporation, a pioneering company in the area of Massively Parallel Processors (MPPs), where he held a variety of technical positions. Josh has worked on developer tools for distributed parallel computing, including language and compiler design, scalable parallel debugger design and development, and MPI. He has also worked in the areas of 3D graphics, image processing, and real-time device control. Josh has an undergraduate degree in Engineering from Harvard College and a Masters in Computer Science from Harvard University. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of OpenMP since 2002 and is currently serving as Chairman of the Board.
Christian Tanasescu, Vice President of Software Engineering, SGI (Industry Panelist)
As Vice President of Software Engineering, Christian is responsible for system software and middleware development, ISV relationships and application benchmarking. In addition, he is also managing the SGI Cyclone(tm) initiative for HPC specific cloud computing. Since joining SGI in 1992, Christian has held a number of management positions in HPC system engineering, strategic partner management, performance modeling and application enablement. He initiated the Top20Auto study to analyze development of HPC platforms and applications in the automotive industry. Prior to SGI, Christian worked at Fujitsu-Siemens in compiler development and served on the Fortran 90 standardization committee. Christian holds a master's degree in Computer Science from Polytechnic University of Bucharest.
Dr. Kenichi Miura is a professor in High-end Computing and Director of the Center for Grid Research and Development at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) (Industry Panelist)
He also serves as a Fellow at Fujitsu Laboratories Limited, a visiting professor at the National Astronomical Observatory, and as a visiting researcher at RIKEN in conjunction with the Next Generation Supercomputer Project. At SC'09, he received the prestigious 2009 Seymour Cray Computer Eng. Award.
Dr. Miura received his B.S. degree in Physics from University of Tokyo in 1968, MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1971 and 1973, respectively. At the same time, he worked as a research assistant and later a research associate in the ILLIAC IV Project. Dr. Miura joined Fujitsu in 1973, and since then has been involved in mainframe computer design, high-performance computer design, and special-purpose signal processor design for the radio astronomy. From 1992 to 1996, he was Vice President and General Manager of Supercomputer Group at Fujitsu America, Inc. in San Jose California, where he was responsible for the entire supercomputer-related activities in the U.S., including computational research on vector and parallel algorithms for Fujitsu supercomputer systems.
In 1997 Dr. Miura became Chief Scientist in the HPC Division of Fujitsu, and in 2002, he was promoted as a fellow with the Fujitsu Laboratories Limited. In 2003 he joined the National Institute of Informatics. He served as the Project Leader of the National Research Grid Initiative Project (NAREGI) from 2003 to 2008, which was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Since 2008, Dr. Miura has been directing a new project called "Resource Linkage for e-Science (RENKEI)", which is also funded by MEXT.
Dr. Miura's research interest includes supercomputer architecture, grid computing, vector and parallel numerical algorithms, pseudo-random number generation algorithms for the Monte Carlo simulations, and non-linear dynamics.
Dr. Per Öster, Director of Application Service, CSC, Espoo, Finland (Industry Panelist)
Dr. Per Öster is the newly appointed Director of Application Service at Scientific Computing, Ltd. (CSC) in Espoo, Finland. Dr. Per Öster previously worked at the Center for Parallel Computers at KTH in Sweden and is internationally recognized as one of the Nordic region's top specialists in grids. He was actively involved with the EGEE II initiative funded by the European Commission as a member of the project's management board. Now, CSC is serving as one of the nine leading organizations in the EGI Design Study, with CSC's area of responsibility being communications and external relations. EGI is meant to continue from where the EGEE III project ends.
Tom-Michael Thamm is the VP for Products at mental images and is responsible for all products, such as mental ray and RealityServer. and he is managing the customer support. Mr. Thamm is working for mental images for over 20 years. He has led several key projects of mental images, such as integration of mental ray into many of the major CAD systems. He has studied Mathematics and has developed various 3D file formats, such as extended OBJ, and free-form surface algorithms for mental images.
John Barr, Research Director, Financial Markets & Head of EU Research (Analyst Panelist)
John covers IT early adoption and innovation in the financial markets and High Performance Computing at The 451 Group. He is also responsible for the company's research activities within the European Commission Framework Program. John has over 30 years of experience in the IT industry, initially writing compilers and development tools for High Performance Computing platforms. The bulk of his career has been spent in a variety of technical roles at HPC systems vendors, delivering training, running benchmarks and providing pre and post sales customer support. John's core technical skill is application performance analysis, optimization and parallelization, which is as valuable in analyzing low latency architectures in financial markets as it is in HPC environments.
Steve Conway, Research Vice President in IDC's High Performance Computing group (Analyst Panelist)
Steve plays a major role in directing and implementing HPC research related to the worldwide market for technical servers and supercomputers. A 25-year veteran of the HPC and IT industries, Steve authors key IDC studies, reports and white papers, helps organize and advance the HPC User Forum, and provides thought leadership and practical guidance for users, vendors and other members of the HPC community.
Before joining IDC, Steve was vice president of corporate communications and investor relations for Cray Inc. He was also a divisional leader for SGI and headed corporate communications and analyst relations for Cray Research and CompuServe Corporation. Steve had a 12-year career in university teaching and administration at Boston University and Harvard University. A former Senior Fulbright Fellow, he holds bachelor's and master's degrees in German from Columbia University and a master's in comparative literature from Brandeis University, where he also completed doctoral coursework and exams.
Addison Snell, Chief Executive Officer, Intersect360 Research (Analyst Panelist)
Addison is the CEO of Intersect360 Research and a veteran of the High Performance Computing industry. He launched the company in 2007 as Tabor Research, a division of Tabor Communications, and served as that company's VP/GM until he and his partner, Christopher Willard, Ph.D., acquired Tabor Research in 2009. During his tenure, Snell has established Intersect360 Research as a premier source of market information, analysis, and consulting. He was recently named one of 2010's "People to Watch" by HPCwire.
Snell was previously an HPC industry analyst for IDC, where he was well-known among industry stakeholders. Prior to IDC, he gained recognition as a marketing leader and spokesperson for SGI's supercomputing products and strategy. Snell holds a master's degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Tom Tabor, CEO and Publisher, Tabor Communications Inc.
Josh Simons, Chief Technical Officer, VMware.
Christian Tanasescu, Vice President of Software Engineering, SGI.
Dr. Per Öster, Director of Application Service, CSC, Espoo, Finland.
Tom-Michael Thamm, Vice President, Products, mental images, GmbH.
John Barr, Research Director, Financial Markets & Head of EU Research.
Steve Conway, Research Vice President in IDC's High Performance Computing group.
Addison Snell, Chief Executive Officer, Intersect360 Research.