Wolfgang Gentzsch announces the ISC Cloud’11 Conference, September 26–27, Dorint Hotel in Mannheim, Germany.

These days, High Performance Computing (HPC) is increasingly moving into the mainstream. With commodity off-the-shelf hardware and software and thousands of sophisticated applications optimized for parallel computers, every engineer and scientist today can perform complex computer simulations on HPC systems--small and large. However, the drawback in practice is that these systems are monolithic silos, application licenses are expensive and they are often either not fully utilized, or they are overloaded. Besides, there is a long procurement process and a need to justify the expenses including space, cooling, power, and management costs that go into setting up an HPC cluster.

With the rise of cloud computing, this scenario is changing. clouds are of particular interest with the growing tendency to outsource HPC, increase business and research flexibility, reduce management overhead, and extend existing, limited HPC infrastructures. Clouds reduce the barrier for service providers to offer HPC services with minimum entry costs and infrastructure requirements. Clouds allow service providers and users to experiment with novel services and to reduce the risk of wasting resources.

Rather than having to rely on a corporate IT department to procure, install and wire HPC servers and services into the data center, there is the notion of self-service, where users access a cloud portal and make a request for servers with specific hardware or software characteristics, and have them provisioned automatically in a matter of minutes. When no longer needed, the underlying resources are put back into the cloud to service the next customer. This notion of disposable computing dramatically reduces the barrier for research and development! Clouds will surely revolutionize how HPC is applied because of its utilitarian usage model. Clouds will make HPC genuinely mainstream.

The ISC Cloud’11 conference will help you to understand all the details of this massive trend: the conference will focus on compute and data intensive applications, their resource needs in the cloud, and strategies on implementing and deploying cloud infrastructures. It will address members of the HPC community, especially decision makers in small, medium, and large enterprises and in research (chief executives, IT leaders, project managers, senior scientists, and so on). Speakers will be world-renowned experts in the field of HPC and cloud computing. They will, undoubtedly present solutions, guidelines, case studies, success stories, lessons learned and recommendations to all attendees.

The remarkable success of the first international ISC Cloud’10 Conference held last October in Frankfurt, Germany, has motivated ISC Events to continue this series and organize a similar cloud computing conference this year, with an even more profound focus on the use of clouds for High Performance Computing (HPC).

Following the recommendations of last year’s participants, this year, we will be inviting more expert speakers with real end-user hands-on experiences reporting on advanced topics, thus providing all attendees insightful details. This conference is highly valuable for members of the HPC community who want to understand this massive trend and mainstream HPC. For sponsors, this year, we have an additional goody: table-top exhibition space!

ISC Cloud’11 will be held at the Dorint Hotel in Mannheim, from September 26–27. The ISC Events team and I look forward to welcoming you.
http://www.isc-events.com/cloud11/

Wolfgang Gentzsch
ISC Cloud General Chair