[FOSDEM] [ANN] FOSDEM'16 HPC, Big Data, and Data Science Devroom Call for Participation

[Ewan Higgs]

FOSDEM'16 HPC, Big Data, and Data Science Devroom Call for Participation
Sunday, January 31, 2016, Brussels, Belgium

Also available here: <https://hpc-bigdata-fosdem16.github.io/>

# Overview

We are proud to announce the 1st edition of the HPC, Big Data and Data Science
devroom, co-located with FOSDEM 2016. FOSDEM is an annual conference about free
and open source software, attended by over 5000 developers and open-source
enthusiasts from all over the world. FOSDEM has hosted an HPC devroom before,
but this is the first time that representatives from the HPC and Big Data
communities are joining forces to bring both communities together with this
devroom.

     High Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data are two important approaches
     to scientific computing. HPC typically deals with smaller, highly structured
     data sets and huge amounts of computation while Big Data, not surprisingly,
     deals with gigantic, unstructured data sets and focuses on the I/O
     bottlenecks. With the Big Data trend unlocking access to an unprecedented
     amount of data, Data Science has emerged to tackle the problem of creating
     processes and approaches to extracting knowledge or insights from these data
     sets. Machine learning and predictive analytics algorithms have joined the
     family of more traditional HPC algorithms and are pushing the requirements
     of cluster and data scalability.

     Free and Open Source communities have been the foundation of the HPC and Big
     Data communities for some time. In the HPC community, it should be no
     surprise that 488 of the Top500 supercomputers in the world run Linux. On
     the Big Data side, the Hadoop ecosystem has had a tremendous amount of Open
     Source contributions from a wide range of organizations coming together
     under the Apache Software Foundation.

     Our goal is to bring the communities together, share expertise, learn how we
     can benefit from each other’s work and foster further joint research and
     collaboration. We welcome talks about Free and Open Source solutions to the
     challenges presented by large scale computing, data management and data
     analysis.

The devroom will take place on Sunday, January 31st 2016, at ULB (Campus
Solbosch), in Brussels, Belgium. Join us to enjoy a full day of talks, demos and
interesting discussions on open-source HPC, Big Data and Data Science.

Sounds interesting? Submit your talk proposal below and see you in Brussels!

# Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

     Architecture and design of High Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data
     systems

     Architecture and design of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) and data
     acquisition pipelines

     Data security and governance

     Tools and technologies related to HPC and computational science, for
     example:
         Multithreading (OpenMP, etc.)
         Distributed computing (MPI, etc.)
         GPGPU computing (OpenCL, OpenACC, etc.)
         Parallel filesystems and storage
         Large-scale performance analysis and debugging
     Computational paradigms for Big Data systems
         MapReduce engines
         Streaming engines
         SQL engines
         Dataflow engines
     Emerging hardware trends of large scale clusters
         Large scale memory pooling
         High-speed interconnects
         ARM cluster architecture
     System administration of HPC and Big Data clusters

     User support tools

     Machine learning libraries and tools

     Scientific software applications, tools and libraries (across all scientific
     domains)

     Big Data platforms, extensions to existing systems, libraries, APIs

     Experiences reports on using Big Data systems, for example:
         Large-scale deployments
         Development and configuration issues
         Tuning and performance tips and lessons learned
     Interesting Big Data use-cases and applications

     Comparative analysis of existing systems, evaluation results, performance
     studies

     Interdisciplinary HPC/Big Data use-cases, for example:
         Applications using both HPC and Big Data technologies
         Integration issues
         Open research problems on the convergence of HPC and Big Data
         Running MPI jobs on Big Data clusters and vice-versa

# Submission

We invite presenters to submit talk proposals to present high-quality work with
sufficient background material to be clear to the HPC, Big Data, and/or Data
Science communities. Talks proposals should be submitted through the FOSDEM
Pentabarf server. Submissions must include:

     Abstract
     Session type
     Session length
     Expected prior knowledge / intended audience
     Speaker bio
     Links to code / slides / material for the talk (optional)
     Links to previous talks by the speaker

Our intention is to have a full day of talks of about 20 minutes each, with an
additional 5 minutes for questions by attendees.

We would also like to note:

     Talks will be streamed live and will be recorded. By submitting a session,
     speakers agree to being recorded and having their talk made available.

     All accepted talks will be about (using) free and open source software. We
     highly discourage “marketing” talks.

Submit here: <https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM16>

When submitting your talk in Pentabarf, make sure to select the ‘HPC, Big Data,
and Data Science Devroom’ as the ‘Track’.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous FOSDEM edition, please
reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous
year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, do not despair: contact
hpc-bigdata-devroom [at] lists.fosdem.org .  Dates

Call for parcipation available: November 2, 2015

Call for participation closes: December 4, 2015

Devroom schedule available: December 18, 2015

Devroom dinner: Saturday January 30, 2016 (subject to change)

Devroom date: Sunday January 31, 2016

# Organizers

     Ewan Higgs - HPC team at Ghent University
     Kenneth Hoste - HPC team at Ghent University
     Roman Shaposhnik - Pivotal
     Vasia Kalavri - KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

We adopt the Apache Code of Conduct.
<http://www.apache.org/foundation/policies/conduct.html>

Please email hpc-bigdata-devroom at lists.fosdem.org with questions or concerns.