Heidelberg set to host inaugural ISC Big Data conference

This month sees the launch of an exciting new conference series from ISC Events. The inaugural ISC Big Data conference is set to take place on 25-26 September in Heidelberg, Germany.

The event has the tagline 'Where Enterprise and HPC meet' and will be chaired by Sverre Jarp, who is chief technology officer of CERN openlab, a unique public-private partnership involving a host of major ICT companies. Watch out for our in-depth interview with Jarp in the 18 September issue of iSGTW.

ISC Big Data '13 will also feature an opening keynote speech from Felix Wortmann of the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, and the Bosch Internet of Things Lab. He asks whether big data is just overblown hype or if it has the potential to have lasting impact as a disruptive innovation? "More data and low latency do not directly translate into additional business value," Wortmann told ISC's Nages Sieslack in an interview last month. "To facilitate disruptive innovation and new business models, you have to bring together business opportunities as well as IT capabilities. Therefore, business and IT have to collaborate and rethink how business is done tomorrow."

Sieslack has also recently spoken to Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing. He will be giving the opening keynote speech at ISC Cloud '13, which is set to be held on 23-24 September, immediately prior to the big data event. Stowe will be talking about what happens when scientists and researchers are no longer limited by fixed-size compute and data capacity. "The past five years have been a period of tremendous growth for HPC in the cloud or utility HPC — it’s clearly reached the point of global awareness and mainstream adoption," he told Sieslack. "Individual users and companies as a whole have realized that on-demand access to the right compute and data resources at the right time makes better science and better business possible faster and at less cost than possible before."

The two separate co-located events promise to be very exciting and we'll be featuring more coverage of them both in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you might like to read our roundup of last year's ISC Cloud event or browse our extensive coverage of ISC'13 held in June in Leipzig, Germany.

- Andrew Purcell