Audience 01

Cloud Debate: Cloud or Not Cloud, That Is the Question

Thursday, October 28, 2010
Westendhalle 1

 

Chair:
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, ISC Cloud General Chair, Germany

5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
  • Prof. Dr. Kathy Yelick, Director of NERSC, Associate Berkeley Lab Director for Computing Sciences, & Professor of Computer Science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) & University of California at Berkeley, USA
  • Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Member of the Board of Directors of the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) & Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, Germany

 

In recent interviews about the future digital market, Commissioner Neelie Kroes from the European Commission has stated that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) today provide 5 percent of the total wealth creation in Europe. This is expected to increase even further with the EC's promise of broadband connectivity of 30 MBit for all European citizens by 2013. One important part of this success story is provided by clouds, which offer a wide variety of services to all users, from sophisticated applications for scientists to home applications for everyday use.

But what makes a cloud a cloud? Is it a fundamentally new concept? Or a predictable evolution of earlier systems and services? Or is it merely marketing hype?

In this debate, two internationally recognized leaders in high performance computing will provide their views of cloud computing. Prof. Katherine Yelick, Director of NERSC and leader of the successful Magellan Cloud Testbed, will present her views on cloud services and what it takes to create an HPC cloud for science. Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Member of the Board of Directors of the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) & Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, takes a more skeptical perspective as he clears away the hype obscuring a realistic view of clouds.