Carolyn Devany and Plexus DV Project Manager Bill Stube were invited to a private networking event hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSC) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne (http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/) where they were able to meet with select customers from both Germany and the US.
Mr. Giles’ goal is to increase industry use of supercomputing. In Germany, his primary target is the automobile industry. At NCSC Merle runs an industrial partners program that allows global industry users to their applications on a variety of high performance computers. We have been invited to talk with NCSC about adding a Data Vortex system to their offerings. Tabor Communications is the leading international media, communications, and advertising company for HPC, big data, enterprise cloud, and digital manufacturing communities. They have four popular online publications and are deeply involved in tracking and supporting events, news, and significant trends in supercomputing. Mr. Tabor was eager to learn more about the Data Vortex and will work with Carolyn to identify areas of support.
Carolyn Devany met with Dr. Cynthia McIntyre, former Senior VP on the US Council of Competitiveness, to discuss the importance of bringing high performance computing to emerging economies in the developing world. A DV system’s small footprint, low power requirement, time to solution, and ease of programming could make it a strong candidate for this important job. We look forward to Dr. McIntyre visiting our offices in September.
Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert is one of the most influential and visionary figures in German supercomputing. He is Head Director of Institute for Advanced Simulation, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/EN/Home/home_node.html), a member of the Board of Directors of the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC), and holds the Chair for Computational Theoretical Physics at the University of Wuppertal. Dr. Lippert plays a leading role in determining the course for Germany’s decisions in future computing technologies. Coke hosted Dr. Lippert and his assistant, Julia Kämpfer, for a private briefing on the Data Vortex and it’s future potential for reaching exascale. Dr. Lippert noted that this was his most exciting meeting during the conference and extended an invitation to Coke to visit the Jülich Supercomputing Centre this fall.
Bill Stube met with Super Micro representatives about their latest designs and explained here to Carolyn why Chief Engineer, Ron Denny, has selected these servers for our current DV205s and DV206s. (http://www.supermicro.com/index_home.cfm)
It could be challenging for Data Vortex to deliver systems to European customers, but fortunately our engineering and manufacturing partner, Plexus Corp., has a dynamic, new state of the art design center in Germany. We met with the senior team there which is now being led by long-time Plexus executive and Data Vortex Supporter, Mr. Oliver Mihm (many of our members were introduced to him at our Boulder, Co event at SC14). Oliver was recently promoted to President of the Plexus EMEA Region (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) and is reaching out on our behalf to his contacts in Germany and Europe. These potential customers include organizations like the the European Space Agency (ESA). (http://www.esa.int/ESA) Pictured with the Data Vortex team from the Darmstadt Design Center (from left to right) are Jorge Halfmann, Oliver Mihm, and Berkan Artun.
Coke was invited to visit the prestigious Heidelberg Academy and had a wonderful time exchanging ideas on the future of scientific computing with some of Germany’s most distinguished physicists and mathematicians and their graduate students.
Our Project Manager from Plexus, Bill Stube (who speaks fluent German), supported all of Coke’s Germany talks with an engineering and manufacturing overview of Data Vortex systems. (Here is an abstract of those presentations: http://www.https://www.datavortex.com/heidelberg-abstract/.)
As an invited speaker for the Annual Colloquium 2015 “Applied Science: theory comes true,” Coke discusses the Data Vortex with graduate students and faculty at The Heidelberg Graduate School of Mathematical and Computational Methods for the Sciences. (http://www.mathcomp.uni-heidelberg.de/events/)
Dr. Willi Jäger invited his Data Vortex guests to a “Sausage Party” at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. This was Coke’s first visit to Germany and inzwischen guter Wissenschaft und gutem Wurst scheint sein Erbe.
After Coke’s talk to faculty and graduate students from the University of Ulm’s Departments of Physics, Quantum Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science, Dr. Wolfgang Schleich and his wife, Kathy, hosted the Data Vortex guests for a lovely outdoor dinner at their home in Ulm. Here we had the opportunity to visit with some of Dr. Schleich’s doctoral and post-doc students (left to right: Dr. Maxim Efremov, Hr. Alexander Mueller, Dr. Enno Giese). Dr. Schleich is encouraging his graduate students and post-docs to port their research onto Data Vortex Systems. They have already started working with Data Vortex Research Mathematician and Physicist, Dr. Santiago Betelu.
Our host at the University of Ulm was Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schleich, Director of the Quantum Physics Department. We were introduced to Dr. Schleich by Data Vortex member, Dr. John Neuberger with whom he is doing joint research. Dr. Schleich is also a member of the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (http://tias.tamu.edu/facultyfellows/2013-2014/wolfgang-schleich). We enjoyed continued collaboration with Dr. Schleich and his students, having hosted them last September.