A Preview of September’s Bio-IT World Cloud Summit

July 9, 2012

By Bio-IT World Staff  

July 9, 2012 | This September, scientists will gather in San Francisco for the second annual Bio-IT World Cloud Summit, following its successful debut in La Jolla last year.  

The meeting, which runs from September 11-13, has been expanded to feature three concurrent tracks – High-Performance Computing (HPC), Cloud-Optimized Networks, and Data-Focused Cloud Applications.  

The High-Performance Computing track will feature presentations that showcase the fastest supercomputers in the world – from the Japanese K computer (Makoto Taiji, RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Sciences) to China’s Tianhe-1 (Nan Li, National University of Defense Technology). In the opening keynote slot, Miron Livny (U. Wisconsin) will discuss Condor, a widely used high-throughput computing system. And there will be a talk on Flash Gordon, the flash-based supercomputer built at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.  

A new track this year -- Data-Focused Cloud Applications – is the quintessential big data analysis track, where the Cloud really comes into its own. Speakers will discuss examples of big data analysis projects in genetics, proteomics and drug discovery research, as well as presenting optimal tools. Speakers include distributed computing pioneer Vijay Pande (Stanford University), Mirko Buholzer (Complete Genomics), Nachum Shacham from eBay, and Andreas Sundquist, co-founder/CEO of DNAnexus. We’ll also hear from Boehringer Ingelheim about some promising strategies in crowd-sourcing and ‘gamification’ in the drug discovery process.  

The track will conclude with a session devoted to mobile technologies, which will put the future of cloud-based technology into perspective. Presenters include Eidogen-Sertanty CEO Steven Muskai on ‘why future medicines will need to be discovered in the cloud,’ and BioTeam principal Bill van Etten, who earlier this year demoed an exciting Siri-based application using the BT cloud.   

The Cloud-Optimized Networks track kicks off with a presentation by Hugh Williams from eBay on extreme data, illustrating for how other data-intensive organizations can teach the life sciences a thing or two about managing big data and real-time data analytics.     

Other speakers in this track include Dan Pitt (Open Networking Foundation) on software-defined networking; Jason Stowe (CEO Cycle computing) on the latest successes in cloud-based utility supercomputing; and Ron Taylor (Pacific Northwest National Lab) on the application of Hadoop and other open-source software resources in bioinformatics.    

Ron Hawkins will discuss the SDSC’s hybrid cloud storage environment, while Chandra Krintz (UC-Santa Barbara) will present on their AppScale platform-as-a-service to transition applications into the cloud.  

In addition, there will be two short courses held on the eve of the conference (September 10): An introduction to RDMA Technology and An Overview of OpenFlow and Software-Defined Networking.  

Full conference and registration details can be found at: www.Bio-ITCloudSummit.com