Updated 3 February 2018
The New Stack
New trends and R&D are looking at lean and lightweight Operating Systems, test new algorithms that scale and save power and seem to be more than just optimisation. How would the integration be to applications: are virtualisation and Docker going to survive?
Gustafson, Gerofi, Harding, O’Keefe, van der Pas

Gustafson, van der Pas, Harding, O’Keefe, Gerofi
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Computing at the Edge
Increasingly, computations are handled at the point where the data is being collected: what are the scalability and security issues? How will we deal with legacy systems and code, i.e. towards Industry 4.0?
van der Pas, El-Zein, Hilgeman, O’Keefe, Moir, Yule

Yule, van der Pas, Hilgeman, Moir, O’Keefe
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Precision Agriculture: how to feed the world through data
Big Data, IoT and HPC are converging rapidly to create new alternatives in several diverse fields, ranging from Genomics to FinTech
Is the Internet of Food a solution for the population growth towards the next decades?
Compton, El-Zein, Stanzione, Hilgeman, Yule
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Global mega-projects: the SKA challenges
Global mega-science projects involving several countries are becoming the norm for challenges such as climate change, life sciences research, etc. Meanwhile, computing moves towards exascale capabilities. What are the distributed computing requirements for the countries and systems? Can we make it happen from New Zealand, making the SKA (Square Kilometre Array radio-telescope) project a flagship?
Mellado, Ensor, Harding, Stanzione
Moderator: Don Christie, Catalyst IT

Don Christie (Moderator), Harding, Ensor, Mellado, Stanzione
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Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Deep Learning, IoT… what’s behind the hype?
Over the years we got used to terms such as “cloud”, “mobile”, or “BYOD”. Then suddenly we are flooded with mixed promises that oscillate between a bright future and doom and gloom. This is caused by the expectations and fears related to supposedly grandiose advances in AI, DL, IoT, etc
Have we been here before? Is this just another wave of (near science fiction) predictions from the so called “experts” from mainstream media, or are there actually fundamental changes in the underlying technologies to support this rapid evolution?
Compton, Moir, Gerofi, Gustafson, van der Pas

Erdödy (Moderator), Gustafson, Gerofi, Moir, Compton
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Meltdown & Spectre: and now what?
The year just started and we already have two major vulnerabilities impacting almost all the processors made in the last 20 years.
How will the Enterprise and Scientific IT world look by 2020? Are we going to be ready for the challenges posed by problems in hardware and its performance? How do we prepare for the exascale era coming in the next decade? Or should we just assume that we reached a plateau in speed and performance?
Matsuoka, El-Zein, Gustafson, Hilgeman, Stanzione

Erdödy (Moderator), Gustafson, Hilgeman, Stanzione
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