Panels – 6th Multicore World

Draft v3.5 (subject to changes) – Updated 20th February 2017

General

  • Panels are motivated by 2-3 questions

  • Goal is to freely debate about the topic in brainstorming mode -no lectures, and trigger new thinking

  • Moderator will briefly introduce each panelist (30”)

  • Questions and panelists’ names will be in a slide at the screen

  • Each panelist will briefly (3’) introduce her/his position about the questions -no slides required

  • Open and dynamic discussion between the panel and with the audience

  • Controversial statements are encouraged -panel will not be broadcasted

  • Ideal outcome is to reach some consensus but no conclusions are required

Day 1 – Monday 20th February 2017

11:30 – 12:15  Panel – From a Multicore World to the Exascale Era -and beyond! What could happen? What NEEDS to happen?

Around 2004 multicore hardware became common. Vendors pushed the new architectures to the market without asking if the software community was ready. Now that we envisage a new era towards exascale for the next decade -with massive challenges, do we have time to prepare ourselves? What do we need to do? Which are the possible benefits and, are worth the effort?

Prof. Satoshi Matsuoka (Japan) – Moderator

Prof. Michelle Y. Simmons (Australia)

Pete Beckman (US)

Dave Jaggar (NZ)

Prof. Michael Kelly (UK-NZ)

Prof. Tony Hey (UK)

3:30 – 4:15 Panel – BD / AI / ML / IoT / C@E / Deep Learning, etc, etc…Which is the Real Technology Behind These Trendy Buzzwords?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hot topic today but the term originated more than 60 years ago. Marketing experts “insert” buzzwords such as BD to reach a broad audience even if they don’t understand it. Do these practices actually explain technical progress? Are we entering an era of accepting “magic boxes” full of data which instead of advancing basic science and core technologies is actually creating a monopoly of a few owners of knowledge? Will IBM’s Watson or Amazon’s Alexa emerge as the AI equivalents of Intel?

Pete Beckman (US) – Moderator

Paul Fenwick (Australia)

Prof Michael Kelly (UK-NZ)

Paul McKenney (US) 

John Gustafson (Singapore)

Prof Satoshi Matsuoka (Japan)

Day 2 – Tuesday 21st February 2017

11: 45 – 12:25 Panel – Towards the SKA Tender: Challenges and Opportunities

The Square Kilometre Array radio-telescope project (SKA) will be the largest scientific instrument of the 21st century and the ultimate Big Data project. Construction budget for its first phase is capped at € 674 million (2016 euros) and the tender process will start to be defined from 2018. The panel will discuss the opportunities for their countries and the potential for a collaborative approach towards development of new computing technologies

Nicolás Erdödy (NZ) – Moderator

Simon Rae (NZ)

Prof. Tony Hey (UK)

Dr. Happy Sithole (South Africa)

Dr. Andrew Ensor (NZ)

Juan Carlos Guzman (Australia)

Prof Andreas Wicenec (Australia)

3:30 – 4:15 Panel – Where is New Zealand’s ICT / High-Tech Ecosystem Heading?

New Zealand is known as a nation of innovators and early adopters of new technologies. We are an open and democratic society with modern regulations and laws about software and intellectual property, plus a vibrant start up scene and top ranked universities. Still, our economy is mostly based in primary industries with a classic development model. Overall, the primary sector contributes just over half of NZ’s total export earnings. Will the High-Tech sector gain traction and move the economy from a pastoral base into a knowledge-based one? Would be a radical transformation or just an upgrade?

Victoria Mclennan (2016 ICT NZer of the year) – Moderator

Clare Curran, MP (Labour Party ICT Spokesperson)

Ralph Highnam (CEO, Volpara Technologies)

Guy Kloss (Qrious)

Mark Moir (Oracle)

Dave Jaggar (ex-ARM)

Day 3 – Wednesday 22nd February 2017

10:40 – 11:25 Panel – Does Big Science necessarily mean Big Budgets?

Big Science projects are becoming larger and larger in all facets: goals more ambitious than ever, hundreds -if not thousands, of participants distributed all over the globe, and budgets that invariably are in the range of tens to hundreds millions of dollars. Are totally gone the days of the solitary researcher or garage inventor? Or would the HPC evolution through the cloud foster the emergency of a new breed of collective investigation -similar to the open source software development model? How “open” should science be to adapt to that model? And how would evolve one of the assets of a scientist -its reputation, in such a collective model?

Prof. Michael Kelly (UK-NZ) – Moderator.

Prof. Andreas Wicenec (Australia)

Dr. Happy Sithole (South Africa)

Dr. Pete Beckman (US)

Dr. John Gustafson (Singapore)

Prof Satoshi Matsuoka (Japan)

2:15 – 3:00 Panel – Enterprise Systems: How big is the gap to reach 21st century performance? How will legacy code and hardware be updated?

Legacy code is everywhere. Hardware replacement is seen always as a cost -not an investment. As an example, COBOL was written for mainframes created 10 years before man walked on the moon. Those same mainframes still operate some of the biggest institutionalised computing today. How are we going to “teach” these machines to be “intelligent”? How will these systems enter an exascale era in the next decade?

Mark Moir (Oracle, NZ-US) – Moderator

Victoria Maclennan (Optimal BI, NZ)

Paul McKenney (IBM, US)

Paul Fenwick (Perl, Australia)

John Gustafson (ex-Intel, AMD, Sun, Singapore)

Nathan DeBardeleben (LANL, US)