ISC events, the organizers of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) and ISC Cloud have announced a new conference series – the ISC Big Data Conference. The inaugural event will be held September 25 and 26 in the Marriott Hotel, Heidelberg, Germany.

Over the course of two days, the forum will scrutinize numerous facets of big data in order to educate  practitioners and vendors who want to learn more about this rapidly evolving set of technologies.

The first Big Data Conference with the motto “ISC Big Data – Where HPC and Enterprise Meet” will be chaired by Sverre Jarp, the CTO of CERN openlab in Geneva, Switzerland. Sverre brings with him over 39 years of managerial and technical experience in the areas of high-throughput computing (HTC) and big data. His current fields of interest encompass multiple areas, including parallel programming and big data management for physics and other scientific domains.

With the ever-decreasing cost of storage, anyone can, in today’s world of informatics, gather enormous amounts of data, be it through scientific instruments, fine-grained sensors, internet-based business intelligence, medical scans or a myriad of other sources.

“Commodity-based servers and fast interconnects allow companies and service providers to build infrastructure to transform data into meaningful results, significant trends and predictions. Big Data Analytics has become synonymous with 'power' and 'competitive advantage' through the extraction of valuable knowledge by transforming the data,” said Sverre. “The challenge when implementing a 'Big Data' strategy is to select all the right building blocks allowing enterprise analysts or scientists to sift through huge amounts of data in the most nimble way and acquire genuine knowledge from it.”

In order to build successful big data environments, multiple elements must be considered. This entails the physical hardware including the storage media; the entire computing infrastructure, whether it is an in-house solution or an external cloud-based environment; the database and file structures; and, maybe most importantly, the analytics software.

The ISC Big Data Conference will present best-of-breed practices and use cases, based on experiences gathered at large HPC installations and data-intensive enterprises. The event will also provide a forum to review and share the latest technology trends amongst the attendees. The information presented will be especially valuable to technical experts and key IT decision makers in the Big Data domain. Unlike other conferences that limit themselves to a narrower view, the ISC Big Data aims to actively encourage cross-fertilization between enterprise and HPC/HTC. It will also provide links to user sites with long traditions in processing huge data volumes, such as CERN and other facilities that must manage large data repositories.

ISC Cloud’13

ISC events will also be hosting ISC Cloud Conference, currently in its fourth year, but now focusing more on the use of clouds for HPC, end-users and service providers. This conference is highly valued by members of the HPC community who want to learn how they can benefit from this trend toward on-demand high-performance computing.

The ISC Cloud Conference will be held at the Marriott Hotel in Heidelberg, two days before the Big Data Conference, from September 23 – 24, 2013. As in years past, the conference will be chaired by the European “Cloud guru”, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch.