insideHPC » ISC Cloud

Mannheim Panel to Examine Challenges of Moving HPC to the Cloud

Ralph — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:22:50 +0000

Can the cloud really work for HPC applications? For many HPC users thinking of moving their workload to the cloud, the idea of having a user-friendly front end free from back end administration is a strong incentive. At the upcoming ISC Cloud’12 conference, a panel of experts will examine the hurdles of moving HPC to the cloud.

This panel will examine the potential obstacles to cloud adoption, such as security and trust, compliance, outsourcing, performance, virtualization, pricing, payment model, software licenses, choice of service provider or private cloud builder, network bandwidth, and integration of all of these into existing business or research processes.

The event takes place Sept. 24-25 in Mannheim, Germany. Attendees are encouraged to register by Sept. 15 to enjoy the preshow discount.

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Helix Nebula – Europe’s Science Cloud to be Featured at ISC’12 Keynote

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 17:37:40 +0000

The ISC Cloud’12 conference in Mannheim next month will include a keynote session on how the Helix Nebula Initiative is driving scientific discovery. Launched earlier this year, the Helix Nebula Science Cloud was designed to support the massive IT requirements of European scientists and create a cloud computing market for the public sector in Europe.

Cloud Computing is not only having an impact on the private sector but also the public sector including research organisations such as CERN, ESA and EMBL. The feasibility of such a transformation is of great interest to the suppliers of cloud-based services and to the national and European funding agencies. The Helix Nebula initiative is a preliminary step towards a European cloud-based scientific e-infrastructure. Three flagship use cases from high energy physics, molecular biology and earth-observation will be used to validate the approach, enable a cost-benefit analysis to be undertaken and the next stage of the Science Cloud Strategic Plan developed and approved. The Science Cloud infrastructure will be initialized with large-scale unique data sets and bring thousands of scientists on the platform.

For more information, check out the ISC Cloud’12 full program.

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Interview: Wolfgang Gentzsch on the Changing Landscape at ISC Cloud’12

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 10:26:47 +0000

With ISC’12 behind us, the busy Fall season for HPC conference is coming up quickly. One of the growing events in this space is ISC Cloud’12. To learn more, I caught up with Conference Chair Wolfgang Gentzsch.

InsideHPC: What will be the focus topics for ISC Cloud’12 as the conference enters its third year?

Wolfgang Gentzsch: The focus of the conference is on the use of Clouds for High Performance and Technical Computing and Big Data, for engineering design and development, and for scientific discovery. This will include talks about the end-to-end solution processes and on the challenges we face, and how to overcome them.

InsideHPC: You wrote recently that ever-increasing complexity in high performance computing is driving the need for HPC in the Cloud. Isn’t that just moving the problem rather than solving it?

Wolfgang Gentzsch: I see indeed two large and different camps in our community: the one which is using HPC today, on HPC clusters, big and small, doing complex application simulations on a routine basis; and the other, much larger of technical computing users who mostly apply workstations to their R&D problems. Both groups are facing ever increasing complexity, because of the need for higher quality solutions and more complex geometries and physics, but while the first group is moving towards peta- and exascale, the workstation users are stuck with the bottleneck limitations a workstation has, concerning problem size and run time, for example. The two ways to go I can see for them are buying their own HPC cluster or bursting into an HPC Cloud. And at the ISC Cloud Conference we will discuss the benefits and drawbacks of both these approaches.

InsideHPC: Even though Cloud grew out of the Grid, the HPC community has been much slower than the enterprise to adopt cloud as a delivery model. What do you think are the main things impeding Cloud HPC today?

Wolfgang Gentzsch: Enterprise web services based applications are easily moved to the Cloud; you just move them once, and then they stay there forever; what moves back and forth are just a few Bytes: the customers’ services requests and the services themselves. What the HPC community has to move back and forth are the big engineering and science applications, the terabytes of data, and often enough a company’s IP crown jewels, every time they have just one service request; what a huge difference, technically, mentally, politically, and legally.

InsideHPC: The HPC community seems to be kind of a “show me” crowd. Will ISCCloud’12 talks be more from speakers’ real end-user hands-on experiences?

Wolfgang Gentzsch: Very much so, because there are still many hurdles to overcome before you enter HPC Paradise. Therefore, we followed the recommendations of our participants from last year and invited senior expert speakers with real end-user, hands-on experiences reporting on actual scenarios and solutions, often with a pragmatic approach.

InsideHPC: The conference location in Mannheim is bit of a homecoming for ISC. What can attendees look forward to when they come to visit in September? Will Oktoberfest be going on?

Wolfgang Gentzsch: The ISC Cloud conference today is what ISC was 20 years ago: friends and family of decision makers in research and industry, meeting in Mannheim, early adopters in their field, in a vibrant and friendly atmosphere. And the good news for our friends from abroad is that Oktoberfest starts the weekend right before our conference, with the parade of the tent patrons through Munich and the tapping of the first beer barrel, then stops for two days because of our conference, and then continues until October 7!

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ISC Cloud’12 to Focus on HPC and Big Data

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:54:48 +0000

On September 24 – 25, cloud computing experts from around the world will gather at ISC Cloud’12 in Mannheim, Germany with an eye on reducing HPC complexity for researchers.

HPC utilization is becoming increasingly complex and a new trend emerges almost every year. There’s multicore and manycore, scaling up and out, big data, digital manufacturing and the missing middle, green computing, and HPC in the Cloud”, said ISC Cloud General Chair Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, an international expert in HPC and Grids who now brings his expertise to the clouds. “What the end-user is really looking for is research flexibility, easy access to HPC, reduced management overhead, and possibilities to extend the existing and limited HPC infrastructure.”

Registration is now open and an Early-Bird registration fee of EUR 350 is valid until September 14. Read the Full Story.

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ISC Events to Continue Exploration of HPC Clouds in 2012

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:11:17 +0000

Is there enough momentum in Cloud for HPC to drive it’s own conference? Apparently so — ISC Cloud’11 was such a big hit last week that the organizers have already announced intentions to do ISC Cloud’12.

A crowd of 157 IT managers representing industrial and research organizations from 21 countries convened at the Dorint Hotel, Mannheim on September 26-27 to find out from leading HPC and Cloud experts about their experience with designing, building, managing and using Clouds. The attendees found it valuable to have been part of a crowd that is closely interested in this increasingly visible segment of HPC.

According to conference chairman, Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, unlike last year’s event, this year’s focus was on the HPC community’s unique challenges, experiences and future concerns as it looks to cloud computing to solve computational challenges.

ISC Cloud’11 has demonstrated that the hype around Clouds is diminishing. All the involved IT vendors reported concrete Cloud deployments, and we saw a strongly increasing user interest which was demonstrated during the various interactions among the participants especially during the very lively Vendor Showdown and these discussions continued over the coffee and lunch breaks,” said Wolfgang Gentzsch. “Therefore, we, as organizers expect an increasing interest in next year’s ISC Cloud Conference.“

Read the Full Story.

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ISC Cloud’11 Kicks off in Mannheim

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:31:06 +0000

The ISC Cloud’11 conference kicked off in Mannheim yesterday, and you can follow the show from their Live Twitter Stream.

Recently Conference Chair Wolfgang Gentzsch interviewed Ian Foster about his keynote on the state of HPC cloud computing:

I am delighted to be invited to speak at ISC Cloud’11, because it gives me an opportunity to speak to my current passion, which is the vital role that software as a service (SaaS) can play in accelerating discovery. Most discussion of computational science (“HPC”) and cloud emphasizes on-demand computing and storage. But if we focus on hardware alone, we miss the real benefits of the large-scale outsourcing and consequent economies of scale that cloud is about. The biggest IT challenge facing research today is complexity. Certainly, big data demands new storage and computing solutions. But it is establishing and operating the processes required to collect, manage, analyze, share, and archive big data that is taking all of our time and killing creativity. And that’s where outsourcing can be transformative. An entrepreneur can run a small business from a coffee shop, outsourcing essentially every business function–accounting, payroll, customer relationship management, the works–to a SaaS provider. Why can’t a young researcher do the same, and run a research lab from a coffee shop? That’s the question I will pose in my keynote.

ISC Cloud’11 concludes today in Mannheim.

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Ian Foster to Keynote ISC Cloud’11

Ralph — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 07:01:11 +0000

The ISC Cloud’11 conference has announced that Ian Foster’s keynote will be entitled: We’re Smarter than we Think: Accelerating Discovery by Outsourcing the Mundane

Abstract
Whitehead observed that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” I propose that commercial cloud computing can allow us to accelerate dramatically the pace of discovery by removing a range of mundane but timeconsuming tasks from our consciousness. I describe the Globus Online system that we are developing to explore these possibilities, and propose milestones for evaluating progress towards smarter science.

ISC Cloud’11 takes place September 26-27 in Mannheim, Germany. Register now.

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ISC Cloud’11 to Focus on HPC

Staff — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:15:21 +0000

Is HPC ready for the benefits of Cloud Computing that are so widely enjoyed by the enterprise world? At ISC’Cloud’11 this September, cloud computing experts from around the world will gather in Mannheim, Germany with eye on network supercomputing.

The ISC Cloud’11 conference will help you to understand all the details of this massive trend: the conference will focus on compute-intensive and data-intensive applications, their resource needs in the cloud, and strategies on implementing and deploying cloud infrastructures,” said ISC Cloud General Chair Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, an international expert in HPC and Grids who now brings his expertise to the clouds.”This year’s conference will target members of the HPC community, especially decision makers in small, medium and large enterprises and in research.”

The key topics of this conference are:

Industrial Cloud Best Practices
Academic Cloud User Experiences
Modeling HPC Clouds
Key Security & Compliance Issues
Critical Aspects of HPC Cloud

Presented by the same organization that hosts the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), now in its 26th year, ISC Cloud’11 will be held September 26-27. Registration is now open.

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