Choudhary Delivers a Plenary Talk at SC13

Prof. Alok Choudhary gave a plenary talk, titled, "Big Data + Big Compute = An Extreme Scale Marriage for Smarter Science?", at SC13 (Supercomputing Conference) on Thursday, Nov 21, 2013, at the Denver Convention Center.

The Supercomputing conference is one of the two largest in the world in computer science, attended by more than 10,000 people. Attendees from all disciplines of science, security, industry, government, who build or use supercomputers and big data attend this conference.

The focus of his presentation, was on how knowledge discovery has been driven by theory, experiments and by large-scale simulations on high-performance computers.

Modern experiments and simulations involving satellites telescopes, high-throughput instruments, sensors, and super computers yield massive amounts of data. What has changed recently is that the world is creating massive amounts of data at an astonishing pace and diversity.

Processing, mining and analyzing this data effectively and efficiently will be a critical component as we can no longer rely upon traditional ways of dealing with the data due to its scale and speed. But there is a social aspect of acceleration, which is sharing of “big data” and unleashing thousands to ask questions and participate in discovery. This talk addressed the fundamental question, “What are the challenges and opportunities for extreme scale systems to be an effective platform" for not only traditional simulations, but their suitability for data-intensive and data driven computing to accelerate time to insights.