Keynote Address - I

"Clouds: From Both Sides, Now"

Daniel A. Reed, Ph.D.
Vice President for Research and Economic Development, University Computational Science and Bioinformatics Chair, University of Iowa

Abstract: In science and engineering, a tsunami of new experimental and computational data and a suite of increasingly ubiquitous sensors pose vexing problems in data analysis, transport, visualization and collaboration. Cloud computing and "big data" are extending our notions of computational science and engineering, bringing technical, political and economic challenges. What are the software structures and capabilities that best exploit cloud capabilities and economics while providing application compatibility and community continuity? What are the appropriate roles of public clouds relative to local computing systems, private clouds and grids? How can we best exploit cloud elasticity for peak demand? How do we optimize performance and reliability? How do we provide privacy and security? How do we balance traditional HPC investments against cloud opportunities and avoid past research infrastructure pitfalls?

Bio: Daniel A. Reed is Vice President for Research and Economic Development, as well as University Chair in Computational Science and Bioinformatics and Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Medicine, at the University of Iowa. Previously, he was Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Technology Policy and Extreme Computing, where he helped shape Microsoft's long-term vision for technology innovations in cloud computing and the company's associated policy engagement with governments and institutions around the world. Before joining Microsoft, he was the Chancellor's Eminent Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, as well as the Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the Chancellor's Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation for UNC Chapel Hill. Prior to that, he was Gutgsell Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He was also one of the principal investigators and chief architect for the NSF TeraGrid. He received his PhD in computer science in 1983 from Purdue University. Dr. Reed served as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC).

Keynote Address - II

"Advancing Computing Systems from the Data-Cloud Point-of-View"

Xian-He Sun, Ph.D.
Chair and Professor of Computer Science, Illionis Institute of Technology

Abstract: Technology advances are unbalanced. CPU and network performance has been improving at a much faster pace than memory and storage technologies during the last three decades, which has led to the so-called memory-wall problem. In the meantime, newly emerged cloud applications, such as online gaming, social networks, and sensor networks, are all data intensive, which has led to the so-called big-data problem. The lasting memory-wall problem compounded with the newly emerged big-data problem has changed the landscape of computing. CPU speed is no longer the performance bottleneck of a computing system, the data access speed is, whereas the data access speed is often not limited by network bandwidth. However, historically computing systems are designed and developed to utilize CPU performance or mitigate the worst case bandwidth, not the sustained data accessing. A paradigm change is needed to support data-centric computing. In this talk we first review the history and concepts of the big-data and memory-wall problems. We then discuss the challenges of design advanced memory and I/O systems for large-scale computing. Finally, we present some our recent results in understanding and optimizing the performance of memory and I/O systems from the data-could point-of-view.

Bio: Dr. Xian-He Sun is the chairman and a professor of the Department of Computer Science, the director of the Scalable Computing Software laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and a guest faculty in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory. Before joining IIT, he worked at DoE Ames National Laboratory, at ICASE, NASA Langley Research Center, at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, and was an ASEE fellow at Navy Research Laboratories. Dr. Sun is an IEEE fellow and his research interests include parallel and distributed processing, high-end computing, memory and I/O systems, and performance evaluation. He has close to 200 publications and 4 patents in these areas.