Smart NZ Economy Could Grow 10% PA Says 'Father of Grid'

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New Zealand Economy Could Grow by 10% a Year through Clever Use of New IT Says Multicore World 2013 Keynote Address by Director of Computation Institute of Chicago University, Prof Ian Foster

Multicore World 2013’s opening key note from Professor Ian Foster (Argonne Laboratory, University of Chicago^[*]) on ‘How to grow the economy by 10% per year’^[*] is alone worth registering for the two day February event, says Multicore World 2013 founder Nicolas Erdody.

"Attendance at the 19 & 20 February conference and think-tank - which will discuss the impact of greatly increased computing power - should be compulsory for government, industry and anyone who is seriously interested in the future of New Zealand," says Erdody.

“Multicore and parallel programming are here to stay. This is a permanent change that has the potential to underpin a greatly enhanced IT offering.

"New Zealand could, if we think strategically, be a place where new techniques, platforms and processes are originated and developed in collaboration with the rest of the world. We can be a creative environment where New Zealand technologists can help the rest of the world by exporting solutions at the leading edge of multicore.”

The opening keynote speech by Professor Ian Foster, Director of the Computation Institute, a joint unit of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago outlines why he believes a country such as New Zealand can grow its economy by 10% a year.

“Economic growth is driven by the evolving interplay between innovation and automation,” says Foster, often globally acknowledged at ‘the father of the grid’, on his abstract.

“The former provides new products and services and the latter enables cost-competitive and timely production and delivery. Information technology plays an increasingly central role in this process – a role that is only going to accelerate in the next decade as a result of advances in cloud and multicore computing. I discuss the challenges and opportunities inherent in a hyper-connected, hyper-automated world, with a particular emphasis on what they mean for the wonderful country of New Zealand.”

Erdody says the quality of the international line up of speakers is easily the equal of any established northern hemisphere conference on computing, and an extremely cost effective way for IT professionals and others to understand and take advantage of this technology tsunami.

“We should ask ourselves why are these top-notch speakers deciding to come to New Zealand, some of them crossing the equator for the first time, when they can fill auditoriums anywhere?”, asks Erdody. “What do they believe that we can do from here?”

“The learning, the interactions, the business and deal-making connections we saw at Multicore World 2012 will only be enhanced at this year’s event.”

“New Zealand IT's future thinkers should be at this event. Our country has an opportunity to be a niche participant in industries based on multicore technologies, and rather than being swamped by this wave, we have the prospect of riding on its development,” says Erdody.

“Given that Callaghan Innovation is springing into life, Ian Foster’s proposal of growing a clever economy at 10% a year should ring very true and he would like to discuss it with key players in the New Zealand innovation sector in our forums during Multicore World 2013.”

Other speakers include Intel’s Tim Mattson , IBM’s Linux CTO Paul McKenney and FreeBSD’s Poul-Henning Kamp.

Multicore World 2013 registrations are still open [ Click Here: http://www.multicoreworld.com/registration.html ] . The conference will be held at the Wellington Town Hall.

More Information about Professor Ian Foster's Multicore World 2013 Key Note Address

ABSTRACT: How to Grow the Economy by 10% Per Year : Economic growth is driven by the evolving interplay between innovation and automation: the former providing new products and services and the latter enabling cost-competitive and timely production and delivery. Information technology plays an increasingly central role in this process--a role that is only going to accelerate in the next decade as a result of advances in cloud and multicore computing. I discuss the challenges and opportunities inherent in a hyper-connected, hyper-automated world, with a particular emphasis on what they mean for the wonderful country of New Zealand.

Ian Foster is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and an Argonne Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory. He is also the Director of the Computation Institute, a joint unit of Argonne and the University. His research is concerned with the acceleration of discovery in a networked world.

Foster was a leader in the development and promulgation of concepts and methods that underpin grid computing. These methods allow computing to be delivered reliably and securely on demand, as a service, and permit the formation and operation of virtual organizations linking people and resources worldwide. These results, and the associated Globus open source software, have helped advance discovery in such areas as high energy physics, environmental science, and biomedicine.

Grid computing methods have also proved influential outside the world of science, contributing to the emergence of cloud computing. His new Globus Online project seeks to outsource complex and time-consuming research management processes to software-as-a-service providers; the goal here is to make the discovery potential of massive data, exponentially faster computers, and deep interdisciplinary collaboration accessible to every researcher, not just a select few “big science” projects.

Dr. Foster is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the British Computer Society. Awards include the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal, honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and CINVESTAV, Mexico, and the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai award.

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Contacts
Nicolas Erdody, Director Open Parallel. Nicolas.erdody@openparallel.com (027 521 4020)
Karen Bender, Business Growth Manager, Grow Wellington. Karen.bender@growwellington.co.nz (021 628 144)

What is multicore?

The ability of computers to process massive amounts of data has been growing ever since they were invented.

As computer power has increased, the speed of processing has reached a physical barrier, and more processing power cannot be put onto a chip without overheating.

The problem has been solved by putting more processors onto a single chip, creating multicore chips. These multicore chips entered the mainstream market a few years ago, and all vendors currently sell them. They are now standard kit in all laptops, desktops and smartphones.

Multicore chips are also more power efficient, and the number of cores able to be added is theoretically virtually unlimited.

Previously impossible computational tasks can now be achieved. And processes which previously took, days or even weeks to perform can now be done swiftly.

But while this new processing power enables computers to do things faster, it also adds new challenges. Before Multicore computer software was written for a single central processing unit (CPU) in a chip. To exploit the potential of multicore chips, software now needs to be written while thinking in parallel.

But parallel programming is different than traditional programming, and so far few programmers have experience of it.

Multicore is a mainstream but (as yet) niche new technology.

In the next 10-15 years, there will be huge opportunities to translate sequential programming (‘traditional’) legacy code, and to create new software that takes full advantage of thousands of cores in the next generation of chips.

Around the world parallel computing is currently used to process vast quantities of data produced by the internet and the "big data" originating out of social networks and millions of intelligent data recording devices attached to the internet.

Here in NZ it is also used in the biggest CGI rendering facility in the world at Wellington's Weta Digital.

And soon it will be a key component of the information processing required to handle the data produced by the Square Kilometer Array radio - telescope – a global scientific project that New Zealand is a part of. In addition, there is a wide range of services, solutions and systems integration challenges to connect the two world's together.

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