Prof. Dr. Dan Reed, Corporate Vice President, Technology Strategy and Policy & Extreme Computing Group, Microsoft, USA

We are now building cloud data centers and infrastructure far bigger than anything previously contemplated in high-performance computing. These clouds contain hundreds of thousands of cores and many petabytes of data, and they are superficially similar to technical computing systems. However, cloud architectures and software differ from those used for technical computing in some important ways.

What are the software structures and capabilities that best exploit cloud capabilities and economics while providing application compatibility and community continuity? How do we best balance ease of use and performance for research computing? 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? In a world where massive amounts of experimental and computational data are produced daily, how do we best extract insights from this data, both within and across disciplines, via clouds?

This talk will examine these and other issues from a technical perspective.