Speakers – 2015

Schedule – Program – Panels – Conference Summary 2015

The following distinguished speakers are fully confirmed* (click on name for bio, abstracts and more information)

  • Prof. Thomas Sterling – Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University, a Faculty Associate at California Institute of Technology, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Prof. Sterling is Chief Scientist and Executive Associate Director of the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST). He is most widely known for his pioneering work in commodity cluster computing as leader of the Beowulf Project, for which he and colleagues were awarded the Gordon Bell Prize. Thomas Sterling is currently engaged in research associated with the innovative ParalleX execution model for extreme scale computing for the development of future generation Exascale computing systems by the end of this decade.

TWO Keynotes: “Revolutionary Multicore Computing for Exascale” & “HPC Supporting the Cloud Supporting HPC”

  • Scott Houston – Successfully Unemployed, after selling GreenButton to Microsoft, Scott will share his story on how to start a specialised computing company from New Zealand, in “Orcs to Azure – an Entrepreneur’s journey to unemployment”.
  • Prof. Ian Foster – Director Computation Institute, Argonne Labs & University of Chicago, USA.  Prof Foster, known as “the father of the grid” was keynote at Multicore World 2013 –here is his presentation “How to grow the economy by 10% p/year”. For Multicore World 2015, Prof. Foster will speak about “Accelerating discovery via cloud services” covering among other topics the Swift parallel scripting language and comment about the Argo project.
  • Pavlo Baron – Lead Data Technologist & Scientist at codecentric AG, Germany. Global specialist in Big Data, distributed systems, large scale, large data sets, NoSQL. Author of Erlang OTP among other books. Pavlo will speak about “The Hidden Costs of the Parallel World”.
  • Prof. Manuel Ujaldón – NVIDIA CUDA Fellow, Spain. Manuel will speak about CUDA’s features like Dynamic Parallelism and Hyper-Q among others.  His presentation at IV Multicore World will be: “Emerging trends in GPU computing” and at the HPC/Cloud workshop: “Optimizing CUDA kernels for irregular computing.” Abstracts here.
  • Dr. Murray Milner – Managing Director of Milner Consulting Ltd.; Immediate Past Chair  IEEE NZ Central Section; Crown Fibre Holdings – Board Member; Harmonic Ltd -Chairman; former CTO, Telecom New Zealand. “A perspective of advanced ICT developments in New Zealand”.
  • Don Christie – Director and Co-Founder of Catalyst, New Zealand. He manages Catalyst’s global development strategy and key accounts and remains active on matters affecting the openness of the internet. “From SKA to Business Opportunities – Are Spillovers Really Possible?”
  • Alex St John – Best known for his early work on gaming and creating the DirectX media platform at Microsoft in the early 1990’s, Alex later founded Wild Tangent Inc., one of the largest online game publishing companies. More recently he was CTO and President of Hi5.com -with 60+ million users. Alex has over 22 technology patents granted or in process spanning a range of technologies including –streaming 3D graphics and games, compression and artificial intelligence. Today Alex lives in Cambridge, New Zealand and works on massively parallel distributed computing solutions. He spoke at Multicore World 2014 and now will present his most recent work in compression, CUDA and OpenStack in “Supercomputing in the Cloud” and “Mobile servers and its relevance for next generation data centres”
  • Duncan Hall – A Chartered Professional Engineer (in NZ & UK), Duncan was the Software and Computing Domain Specialist of the SKA Program Development Office (2009-2012) where he led the planning for software and computing aspects of the proposed Square Kilometre Array (SKA). He has over 38 years experience in software intensive systems engineering, telecommunications engineering and management, and in management consulting. Duncan currently works as an Enterprise Architect in New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs. Presentation: “SKA compute requirements: What drives the numbers? And how do these numbers drive the Watts?”
  • Dr. Victor Pankratius – Computer research scientist and project principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Haystack Observatory. He is also a collaborative partner of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Following his passion for space science and astronomy, Victor works on advancing scientific software engineering and parallel computing in astroinformatics and geoinformatics. He has worked with major industry partners such as Intel, Sun Labs, Oracle on practical solutions for parallel software development. Prior to MIT he has headed the Multicore Software Engineering research group at KIT in Germany. Presentation (via video-conference): “Computer-Aided Discovery in Astronomy”.
  • Dr. Mark Moir – Concurrency Abstractions authority, former Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems, New Zealand. “Can the world’s problems be solved with good abstractions? How about without?”.
  • Jim Cheetham – Jim works in Information Security, and has a long background in Unix/Linux and Open Source/Free software systems, New Zealand. “OneRNG -an open solution to a core security performance issue”.
  • Dr. Irina Neaga – Lecturer in International Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Plymouth Graduate School of Management & Plymouth Business School, Plymouth University, UK. Presentation at Multicore World 2015: “An analysis of the Cloud Based Big Data Mining applications”.
  • Dr. Kjesten Wiig – National Manager of Commercialisation, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, New Zealand (MBIE). Dr. Wiig manages New Zealand Government’s investment in the SKA project. “New Zealand’s participation in the Square Kilometre Array Project”.
  • Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker – Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) Galactic and Extra-Galactic Project Scientist and Head of the Supernova Remnants team, International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), Perth, Australia. Natasha will present real-world examples of current radio astronomy data processing in “A GLEAM in our eyes: data processing for current and future radio astronomy”.
  • Dr. Andrew Ensor – Research Path Senior Lecturer, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Dr. Ensor is Director of the New Zealand SKA Alliance, a group of New Zealand academic and industry experts contributing to design the SKA Exascale computer system. Dr. Ensor leads the team designing the Survey Correlator, the Central Signal Processor prototyping, and contribute toward Pulsar Search and Imaging Pipeline algorithms in the SKA. “New Zealand’s Contributions to Exascale Computing” and “HPC Spinoffs from the SKA”.
  • Dr. Willem van Straten – Senior Lecturer, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. “Real-time computational requirements of autonomous systems for astronomical discovery”.
  • Luke Hindson – Post Doctoral Fellow, School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. “Science Processing Requirements for the SKA: a case study with the MWA”.

 

More information and updates will be available regularly in this page.

Visit http://www.multicoreworld.com/mw2014 for Multicore World 2014 website.

 

(*) Disclaimer – Multicore World organiser (Open Parallel Ltd) cannot guarantee that all the speakers will participate in the program as anticipated. We have no control over international travel, schedule changes, acts of god, etc. Our liabilities are disclosed in the registration form. In case that a speaker will not be able to participate, we will endeavor to find a substitute of similar calibre but we have no liability under any circumstances. If the event is canceled for any reason (force majeure, etc) our liability is limited to a ticket refund. We are not responsible for airfare, accommodation or any other expenses.