Bio: Joe Mambretti is Director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, which is developing digital communications for the 21st Century. The Center, which was created in partnership with a number of major high tech corporations, designs and implements large-scale services and infrastructure for data-intensive applications (metro, regional, national, and global). He is also Director of the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN), an advanced high-performance network interlinking organization providing services in seven upper-Midwest states,which created the world’s first GigaPoP, and Director of the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility in Chicago, a global exchange for advanced high performance networks, which is based on leading-edge optical technologies. With its research partners, iCAIR has established multiple major national and international network research testbeds, which are used to develop new architecture and technology for dynamically provisioned communication services and networks, including those based on lightpath switching. He is PI for the NSF International Software Defined Networking Exchange (iSDX), PI for the NSF GENI Software Defined Networking Exchange (SDX), co-PI of the Chameleon NSFCloud testbed, PI for the International Global Environment for Network Innovations (iGENI) initiative (funded the NSF), PI for StarWave, a multi-100 Gbps communications exchange, PI for several research projects directed at creating 100 Gbps services, network testbeds, and facilities, and PI for several national and international testbed networks. He is co-developer of the Open Science Data Cloud, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Commons Consortium and the Center for Computational Science Research.

He has served on the advisory boards of major technology corporations, is a frequent speaker at national and international communications technology forums, and has published multiple articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as several books on advanced networking.

Keynote Title: Creating 21st Century Global Research Platforms for Science: Emerging Architecture, Techniques, and Technologies

Abstract: For decades, large-scale computational science has encountered and resolved numerous technology challenges long before more general computational communities. Consequently, the innovations pioneered by HPC science have transformed the information technology landscape. Today, this tradition of innovation continues as advanced HPC science communities take advantage of several macro trends revolutionizing HPC architecture, capabilities, techniques and technologies. These innovations are leading to the conceptualization and prototyping of new types of highly distributed Global Research Platforms (GRPs) for knowledge discovery. These innovations include new virtualization and abstraction layers that enable such distributed environments to be highly flexible and programmable. They allow for sophisticated, granulated integrations of workflow tools with analytics, data and foundation infrastructure resources, including instrumentation. They also enable capabilities for granulated resource discovery, orchestration, provisioning and optimization. These capabilities are built on foundation platform that is migrating from a conglomeration of isolated resources to highly distributed heterogeneous fabrics integrating a wide range of specialized, disaggregated, scalable capabilities that can be blended as needed, including multiple types of workflow tools, analytic techniques, data repositories, and software-defined processors, storage technologies, and high performance, high capacity networks.