Mr. Avi (Avraham) Telyas
Director of System Engineering
Mellanox Technologies Ltd.

Bio:

Avi Telyas is a Director of System Engineering in Mellanox Technologies, leading APAC Sales Engineering and FAE teams. Based in Tokyo, Avi is deeply involved in large HPC, Machine learning and AI deployments in Japan and APAC. In his free time, Avi is coding over AI frameworks and gets too excited talking about it. Avi holds a BSc (Summa cum laude) in Computer Science from the Technion Institute of Technology, Israel

Abstract:

The latest revolution in HPC is the move to a co-design architecture, a collaborative effort among industry, academia, and manufacturers to reach Exascale performance by taking a holistic system-level approach to fundamental performance improvements. Co-design recognizes that the CPU has reached the limits of its scalability, and offers In-Network-Computing to share the responsibility for handling and accelerating application workloads, offload CPU. By placing data-related algorithms on an intelligent network, we can dramatically improve the data centre and applications performance.

Mr. Francis Lam
Director of HPC Product Management
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd

Bio: Francis brings 20+ years of HPC and IT industry experience specialized in server systems design and HPC solution architecture. Before joining Huawei Technologies as Director of HPC Product Management, Francis served in Huawei US R&D Centre since 2011 as an HPC System Architect. Francis is responsible for driving the future direction of Huawei HPC products and solutions. Prior to joining Huawei, Francis has served world leading HPC and IT solution providers such as Hewlett-Packard, Oracle/Sun Microsystems and Super Micro.

Abstract: Emerging technologies such as cloud computing, hardware accelerations, ARM and AI have been increasingly integrated with high performance computing to solve scientific, engineering and business problems. These emerging technologies created the opportunity to develop a new generation of HPC systems that are highly workload-optimized, promised to significantly improve performance, efficiency, scale and creating new ways of designing HPC. This talk explores the possibilities and options when designing the future generation of HPC systems.

Mr. Yoshinori Ohkura
Manager
Global Platform Division, NEC Corporation

Bio: Yoshinori Ohkura is a Manager of global HPC business at NEC Corporation.  His mission is:
(1) to expand HPC business in EU market where NEC has been got many experiences and trust from customers for a long time;
(2) to scale out to APAC area with NEC’s know-how based on Japan and Europe; and
(3) to explore a new segment in AI/Big data area.
He has expertise on both the strategic and technical side, and used to be a member of the development project of NEC’s new HPC product, “SX-Aurora TSUBASA”.

Abstract: NEC has started HPC business since 1980’s and developed a new vector engine which has our original and unique processor in the world. NEC will contribute to the revival of vector processor and growth of memory intensive application not only in HPC area but also AI/Bigdata area.

Dr. Yang Jian
Fellow, ASIC and Layout Design
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD)

Bio: Mr. Jian Yang has graduated from CAG&CG State Key Lab with PhD in 2002. He previous industry experiences included several IC companies on 3D graphics acceleration, Trident Multimedia Co. Ltd, Centrality Communications Co. Ltd and S3 Graphics Co Ltd. In 2006 Dr Yang joined ATI/AMD. Dr Yang has built up a strong team on performance verification, analysis and optimization of modern GPUs. The team has completed more than 40 ASICs’ tape-out. Dr Yang is concentrating on computer architect of HPC and Artificial Intelligence and deep learning algorithm optimization and ROCm open-source platform and HPC apps from AMD.

Abstract: AMD speeds up the HW/SW platforms for virtualization, HPC and machine intelligence with 7nm CPU ROME and 7nm GPU MI60&MI50. AMD RADOEN INSTICTTM MI60 has 7.4 FP64 computing capability, 64GB/s bandwidth PCIe Gen4 and 200GB/s infinite fabric Links. ROCm over OpenUCX provides short latency and high transmission bandwidth for MIP intranode and internode communications. Rapid evolution of ROCM open source software stack supports rapid HPC apps’ porting and many machine intelligence frameworks. Many Math libraries and various machine intelligence primitives are developed and optimized in ROCm on AMD RADOEN INSTICTTM GPUs. AMD is working with many partners to promote ROCm for computing marketing.

Mr. Rajesh Chhabra
General Manager, SE Asia
Cray Inc.

Bio: Rajesh Chhabra is the General Manager of the South-East Asia, Greater China and Western Australia region for Cray. He is a well-known High Performance Computing (HPC) expert in Asia Pacific having been working in this industry for over 18 years in this region.

Rajesh has held key management and business development roles in organisations such as Cray, Silicon Graphics, Altair, Queensland University of Technology and BioInformatics Institute while working in Australia, Singapore and India. Having rich experience of working in HPC hardware and software companies has equipped him with a unique capability to design comprehensive HPC solutions.

He holds a Master in Information Technology from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne and a Master in Technology Management from Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Abstract: The worlds of supercomputing and cloud computing continue to merge. The supercomputing domain continues to learn and adopt the flexibility of cloud computing paradigm while the world of cloud computing continues to demand the scalability and performance of supercomputing domain. As a result, the HPC centres around the world see a need to provide cloud computing infrastructure along with the traditional HPC machines. Cray has been building systems where the needs of both HPC and Cloud domains can be met on a single platform!

This talk will provide a sneak-peek to the next generation of Cray machines which can be scaled to ExaFLOPS while providing the flexibility of hosting a variety of workloads targeted for HTC, Clouds, BigData, AI and traditional HPC.

Mr. Toshiyuki Shimizu
Vice President, System Development Division, Next Generation Technical Computing Unit
Fujitsu

Bio: Mr. Toshiyuki Shimizu is Vice President of System Development Division, Next Generation Technical Computing Unit, at Fujitsu Limited. Mr. Shimizu has been deeply and continuously involved in the development of scalar parallel supercomputers, large SMP enterprise servers, and x86 cluster systems. His primary research interest is in interconnect architecture, most recently culminating in the development of the Tofu interconnect for the K computer and PRIMEHPC series. He leads the development of Fujitsu’s high-end supercomputer PRIMEHPC series and the Post-K supercomputer.

Mr. Shimizu received his Masters of Computer Science degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1988.

Abstract: Fujitsu has provided supercomputers for over forty years; high-end supercomputers and x86 clusters supporting wide application areas and customer requirements. RIKEN and Fujitsu are now developing the “post-K” supercomputer as Japan’s new national supercomputer project. The post-K targets up to 100 times higher application performance with superior power efficiency. The post-K employs the newly developed FUJITSU A64FX CPU featuring the Armv8-A and SVE ISA and widening application opportunities. The post-K contributes to the Arm ecosystem for HPC applications as well as science and society.

At SCA19, Fujitsu will provide updates on post-K development and some performance evaluation results.

Mr. Nebojsa Novakovic
Independent HPC Consultant

Bio: Based in Singapore & China, over 3 decades experience in high-end computer system evaluation, design and deployment across most major platforms. Specific accent on CPU and node & interconnect innovations. Involved in a number of HPC projects in the Asia Pacific, in particular, Singapore & Malaysia and China, assisting the latter with further development and commercialization of its home-grown HPC platforms, locally and internationally. The current focus is on multiplatform hybrid HPC projects.

Abstract: We review the progress of the China Exascale program over the past few years, and the on-going developments, challenges and competitive/cooperative relationships among major contenders. A deeper look into the CPU & system platforms, as well as their possible further post-Exascale future evolution, is followed by the potential for international competition & collaboration assessment.

Mr. Angus Macoustra
Chief Technology Officer, and Scientific Computing Program Leader
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)

Bio: Angus is an Information Technology executive with more than 15 years experience covering application, infrastructure and service management roles. At CSIRO, Australia’s National Science Agency, he provides strategic leadership on technology roadmaps and strategies positioning CSIRO for solving the greatest challenges through innovative science and technology. Angus leads CSIRO’s Scientific Computing program – providing high performance computing, data storage infrastructure, and specialist software development, data analytics and visualisation support to CSIRO’s science and engineering projects. Angus plays a leadership role in the Australian innovation sector on national strategy for research infrastructure, working closely with eResearch providers such as the National Computational Infrastructure, and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, as well as government and other stakeholders. Prior to CSIRO Angus spent time in IT leadership and management roles in Australian Government and also private industry managing significant enterprise IT infrastructure and application portfolios.

Abstract: In this presentation Angus will share some of the opportunities and challenges that digital transformation presents to CSIRO. How CSIRO is shaping its digital transformation in the face of global megatrends influencing our future and the ongoing role of digital technologies such as HPC and Cloud, and emerging technologies such as Quantum computing.

Prof. Sean Smith
Director
Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

&

Mr. Allan Williams
Associate Director
Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

Bio: Sean Smith is Director of the Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and conjointly Professor of computational nanomaterials science and technology at the Australian National University. He has extensive theoretical and computational research experience in chemistry, nanomaterials and nano-bio science and technology. He returned to Australia in 2014 at UNSW Sydney, founding and directing the Integrated Materials Design Centre to drive an integrated program of materials design, discovery and characterization. Prior to this, he directed the US Department of Energy-funded Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of five major DOE nanoscience research and user facilities in the US, through its 2011-2013 triennial phase.

Allan Williams has been the Associate Director responsible for Services and Technology at the National Computational Infrastructure since 2013. In this current role is responsible for the delivery of both quality and innovative integrated research infrastructure services supporting Australia’s leading researchers. He achieved this through re-building the systems and operational teams needed to deliver Australia’s largest public super computer, the world’s fastest research cloud and the southern hemispheres fastest filesystems. Prior to his start at NCI, he was Director of IT Services for the ANU responsible for University-Wide Corporate and Student IT services including networking, cybersecurity and telephony.

Abstract: TNCI is the custodian of Australia’s most powerful supercomputer, its highest performance research cloud, some of its fastest filesystems, and the country’s largest research data repository. In 2019 NCI’s newly commissioned HPC will boost the capacity of Australia’s research infrastructure, supported by technical staff renowned nationally and internationally for their passion and expertise.
NCI’s integration of HPC with HPD provides the essential tools required for researchers to solve the problems of the future. This presentation will cover how NCI has worked in conjunction with the Australian research community to ensure that decadal plans can be achieved.

Dr. Jenni Harrison
Director, Strategic Projects and Engagement
Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

&

Mr. Mark Gray
Cloud Lead
Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Bio: As a member of the Senior Management Team, Dr Harrison leads strategic projects for the Centre, managing negotiations for substantial contracts and the budget for strategic projects.  She is responsible for building and developing partnerships with other organisations and for raising the national and international profile of the Centre.
Dr Harrison deputises for the Executive Director, in areas such as Federal Government matters. She brings two decades of international experience across a range of disciplines, including research, education, policy development, project and funding management. Dr Harrison has held senior-level roles and routinely liaises with organisational leaders and upper management.

The research cloud service at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is called Nimbus. It is utilised by researchers around the globe.  Mr Gray brings a strong research and data management background to his role of managing all aspects of this service. This includes procurement, deployment, training, user expectation management – and leadership of the team who administer and operate the service.
Mr Gray represents Pawsey Supercomputing Centre both nationally and internationally, with respect to the use of Nimbus. He also provides project management skills for projects of key strategic importance to the Centre.

Abstract: Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is one of two national high performance computing centres in Australia providing ‘tier 1’ HPC services to researchers. Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is operated by a joint venture made of up of partner universities and CSIRO with operational and capital investment from the WA State government and the Australian Federal Government. Pawsey is currently in the early stages of the design and procurement of a new generation of computational infrastructure with a new $70m investment, made available in mid 2018. Rapid and emerging change in the demands made on the infrastructure by an increasingly diverse research community requires specific technical solutions to be developed during this process. We will discuss this rapid change, where Pawsey is now and how we are addressing evolving requirements with our current infrastructure. We will also discuss where HPC is challenged in the coming period and how we are expecting to meet these challenges.

Dr. Hing-Yan LEE
Executive Vice President APAC
Cloud Security Alliance

Bio: Hing Yan LEE has 30+ years of ICT working experience in both the public and private sectors. He was global director of the STAR program at the Cloud Security Alliance for in 2017.  Before that, he was Director of National Cloud Computing Office at Infocomm Development Authority for 9+ years, where he was responsible for the national program for, inter alia, developing the cloud ecosystem, promoting cloud adoption by government agencies and private enterprises, and building a trusted environment (including developing the Multi-Tier Cloud Security standards and Cloud Outage Incident Response guidelines).

Mr. Gavin LIU
Solutions Architect
Alibaba Cloud

Bio: Gavin Liu is currently a solutions architect at Alibaba Cloud where he helps customers design their infrastructure architecture in cloud and build their application with elastic, secure components in cloud.

Gavin has over 10 years of work experience in a variety of IT fields such as Application Delivery, Disaster Recovery Data Center design, Cloud Computing, Networking, Storage, Security, etc. and throughout these years, obtained all the ACP (Alibaba Cloud Professional) Certifications (Computing, Security and Big Data).

In 2006, Gavin graduated from Fudan University (Shanghai, China) with Bachelor of Science (BS) in Mathematics.

Abstract: When a customer switches the applications from traditional on-premise environment to the cloud, everything changes, especially in terms of security challenge. With no more physical border around the data center, how do we ensure protection? Hackers have changed from local physical users to anything including laptop, tablet or even mobile phone. In this scenario, how do we defend attacks on the application level? Find out more during the session.

Mr. Vincent QUAH
Regional Head for Education, Research, Healthcare and Not-For-Profit Organizations, APAC Global Public Sector
Amazon Web Services

&

Ms. Akanksha Bilani
Regional Lead, APAC
Intel Corporation

Mr. Vincent Quah: Vincent Quah is responsible for business development with education institutions, research and not-for-profit organizations. He works with educators and students, research scientists and non-for-profit personnel in leveraging AWS Cloud services to save costs, accelerate innovation, and increase organizational agility that better serve their missions.

Ms. Akanksha Bilani: With her team, the group has the charter to drive deep software optimization on all Intel® architectures with the software development tools. Akanksha has built many developer and data scientist related programs like code modernization workshops, software developer conferences, HPCDEVCONs and since the past 15 years has managed to drive the message of parallel programming to over 100,000 developers. She has been driving focused strategies to help build HPC, IOT and now AI knowhow on Intel across the region. Prior to her career at Intel, Akanksha was market evangelist for Microsoft.

Based in Singapore, Vincent Quah has more than 25 years of experience working in senior roles across the education (K12 and tertiary) and learning sectors, life sciences and healthcare industries, as well as high performance computing projects across Asia Pacific.

Abstract: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been used to solve some of the world’s most challenging computing problems – engineering simulations, financial risks analyses, molecular dynamics, weather prediction and many more. In recent years, there have been an accelerated use of AWS in this area that requires a higher bar of protection and security, for example in precision medicine, hosting of medical records and confidential data sets. In this session, we will share the principles we have adopted to allow researchers strengthen their security posture and use AWS confidently to manage and work on confidential and sensitive information.

Mr. Jeffery TAY
Solution Architect
Microsoft

Bio: Jeffery has been working in the education industry for the past 13 years, designing, implementing and securing large scale campus-wide solutions. For the past 2 years, he has devoted his time to helping the industry transform their business by architecting education and research workloads to run securely on the cloud, creating new capabilities and introducing new business models to the industry.

Abstract: Security and research are key in the current time and age where we are seeking to advance our knowledge, solving greater research problems and yet having to continually defend against cyber breaches. This session will cover the current limitations faced by supercomputing centers around the world and how the cloud can step in to help improve efficiencies, protect research data and promote greater collaboration between institutes.

Mr. Jang Thye CHENG
Chief Architect and Head, Digital eXperience Center
Fujitsu Singapore

Bio: Jang Thye joined Fujitsu Singapore in June 2015 as Chief Architect. In his current role, he is responsible for driving strategic technology initiatives and oversees all aspects of solution and architecture design with various delivery teams to deliver a robust ICT portfolio to customers. With over 20 years of professional experience in the industry, Jang Thye has held numerous positions including Systems Engineer, IT Architect, Senior Business Development Manager, and Systems Architect. Prior to Fujitsu, Jang Thye was Chief Architect at CA Technologies where he led the Asia Pacific/Japan (APJ) Solution Architect team in engaging major accounts in the APJ market. His key focus was driving Mobile Application Technologies, particularly in areas such as security, social networking, and application development in the market. Jang Thye holds a Master of Science (Computer Science and Information Systems) and a Bachelor of Science (First Class Honours) (Computer Science and Information Systems), both from the National University of Singapore. Jang Thye is married and has 2 boys. Outside of work, Jang Thye has multiple interests, such as tennis, badminton, swimming, cycling, violin, harmonica, and Go (WeiQi).

Abstract: Security is often a trade-off between what is practical and what is really needed. As HPC workloads are transitioning to public cloud, it is interesting to see the lessons learned from securing many little devices and gateways that are connected to the cloud. IoT devices tend to be small in performance and data size, but what they are aggregating often contributes to the workload in HPC applications. This session discuss about the practical aspects of securing IoT, and the lessons learn will apply very well to securing HPC workloads on public cloud.

Mr. Guan Sin ONG
Head of New Services and Cybersecurity
National Supercomputing Centre, Singapore

Mr. Haojie ZHUANG
Director of Research, APAC
Cloud Security Alliance

Bio: Guan Sin – ONG Guan Sin has over twenty years of diverse experience in the IT industry, spanning roles in IT management of end-user organisations, fast-paced startup businesses and IT vendors. The companies he has worked for include DBS Bank, National University of Singapore, i-Email.net/i-DNS.net, SCS Ltd (now NCS Pte Ltd) and Technology Reserve (Canada). He has experience working with the processes in IETF and SPEC.

Currently serving as head of new services and cybersecurity in National Supercomputing Centre, Singapore, he is chartered to promote the adoption of high-performance computing (HPC) by the industry with the appropriate security provisions and standards. He also sees opportunity in using HPC for security applications. He believes that IT security must align with the business goals and the appetite for risks of the organisation concerned.

Haojie – Haojie is Director of Research for APAC at the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), where his current portfolio includes delivering initiatives from CSA Working Groups, CSA Corporate Members, standards developing organizations, governments, and other strategic partners.

Prior to joining CSA, Haojie was Manager at the Intelligent Computing Lab, Technology Solutions Division of the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) of Singapore. During this tenure, he led the development of artificial intelligence strategic roadmaps, and collaborative projects with industry and research community partners to co-develop machine learning driven solutions, aimed at tackling productivity and sectoral challenges. When Haojie was with the National Cloud Computing Office under the former Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore, he conceptualized & managed data-related initiatives for industry, and led awareness creation efforts for cloud computing in Singapore.

Haojie obtained his B.Eng. (Hons) in Computer Engineering from the National University of Singapore, beginning his career with a brief stint as an events photographer, before getting involved in the research & design of networking protocols for multi-hop underwater networks at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*STAR).

Whenever possible, Haojie prefers inline skating to walking.

Abstract: The trade-off between security and performance has been a concern in the HPC community. A common choice among bespoke HPC infrastructures such as the supercomputing centers of the world is to have limited security in place so as to achieve the preferred level of performance. However, users increasingly desire for both robust security and performance. As HPC Cloud adoption grows, HPC Cloud security research develops and seeks out best practices and recommendations to secure HPC Cloud without compromising performance.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)’s Working Group (WG) on HPC Cloud Security was started with the aim to develop a holistic security framework for cloud infrastructure architected for High Performance Computing (HPC) needs, with the aim of securing where the cloud environment and HPC cross paths. This presentation provides a brief introduction on CSA’s research and the HPC Cloud Security WG.

Mr. Jon LAU
Director of Business Development, APAC
Cloud Security Alliance

Bio: Jon Lau is the Director of Business Development at the Cloud Security Alliance APAC. Jon started his career focusing on Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence at the applied R&D arm of the National Computer Board. He then went on to help spearhead Grid Computing in Singapore from 2003 to 2007. In 2008, Jon moved from A*STAR to IDA (now known as IMDA) where he worked with the industry to leverage on grid services. He then helped strategise and establish the first Government Cloud (G-Cloud) in the region in 2012. In 2015, he joined the National Supercomputing Centre and took on both the Business Development and Strategic Planning and Policy roles, before joining CSA in 2018. Jon obtained his Bachelors of Science (Computer Science) and Masters of Technology (Knowledge Engineering) from the National University of Singapore.

Abstract: TBA

Mr. Ananth Sankaranarayanan
Senior Director of Engineering, Artificial Intelligence Products Group
Intel Corporation

Bio: Ananth Sankaranarayanan serves as the Senior Director in the AI Products Group at Intel, responsible for enabling the customers and partners worldwide to build, accelerate and scale AI applications on Intel platforms. Previously, Ananth led the
creation of Intel’s first production High Performance Computing capability and has delivered three generations of top-500 supercomputers. He has been with Intel since 2001 in various engineering leadership roles. Ananth received Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and MBA in Technology Management from City
University. He holds two patents, has authored numerous technical publications and a book chapter in “Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Networks” proceeds of which go to Black Girls code non-profit.

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence is transforming many businesses around the globe by enabling them to drive operational efficiencies and build new products and services. Intel collaborates with customers and partners worldwide to build, accelerate and scale their AI applications on Intel based platforms. We share
insights on several customer AI use cases we have enabled, the orders of magnitude performance acceleration we have delivered via popular open-source software framework optimizations, and the best-known methods to advance the state of large scale neural network training on Intel Xeon(R) CPU based servers.

Prof. Rodney Van Meter
Vice Center Chair
Keio Quantum Computing Center

Bio: Rodney Van Meter received a B.S. in engineering and applied science from the California Institute of Technology in 1986, an M.S. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California in1991, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Keio University in 2006. His current research centers on quantum computer architecture and quantum networking. Other research interests include storage systems, networking, and post-Moore’s Law computer architecture. He is now an Associate Professor of Environment and Information Studies at Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus. He is the Vice Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Governance, and the Vice Center Chair of Keio’s new Quantum Computing Center. Dr. Van Meter is a member of AAAS, ACM and IEEE.

Abstract: TBA

Dr. Shaohan Hu
Research Staff Member
IBM Q

Bio: Dr. Shaohan Hu is a Research Staff Member at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include cyber-physical systems, mobile ubiquitous computing, crowd and social sensing, big data analytics, cloud computing, and quantum computing.

Abstract: In this talk I’ll introduce IBM Qiskit Aqua, the leading open-source software package that offers a rich and growing set of quantum algorithms. Aqua supports various different domains, including chemistry, finance, machine learning, and more. I’ll go over several concrete example applications from the different domains to demonstrate the power of Aqua.

Prof. Patrick Tan
Deputy Executive Director
Agency for Science, Technology & Research

Bio: Prof. Patrick Tan is a Professor at the Duke-NUS Medical School and Deputy Executive Director of the Biomedical Research Council (Agency for Science, Technology and Research). He directs PRISM, the SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute of Precision Medicine, and was Program Director of POLARIS, which established the first CAP-certified facilities for next-generation sequencing and the first clinically implemented NGS panel in South East Asia, which to date has been been applied to >1000 cancer patients. He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Harvard University and MD PhD degree from Stanford University, where he received the Charles Yanofsky prize for Most Outstanding Graduate Thesis in Physics, Biology or Chemistry. Other awards include the President’s Scholarship, Loke Cheng Kim scholarship, Young Scientist Award (A-STAR), Singapore Youth Award (twice), SingHealth Investigator Excellence Award, Chen New Investigator Award (Human Genome Organization), President’s Science Award, and the Japanese Cancer Association International Award. In 2018, he received the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Team Science Award as Team Leader, representing the first time a team from Asia has received the award. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the Bioethics Advisory Committee (BAC), a Board Member of the International Gastric Cancer Association, and co-chair of the Singapore National Precision Medicine Program Steering Committee.

Abstract: Dissecting the complex interplay between the genome, lifestyle, and clinical factors is fundamental to precision medicine. Among these layers of information, the epigenome is also emerging as an important player in the elusive link between genotype and phenotype. In this talk, I will show various examples, from both oncology and non-oncology, highlighting the intimate relationship between molecular alterations and population variation.

Prof. Yu Shyr
Professor and Chair
Vanderbilt Department of Biostatistics

Bio: Yu Shyr received his Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1994 and subsequently joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. At Vanderbilt, he has collaborated on numerous research projects; assisted investigators in developing clinical research protocols; collaborated on multiple grants funded through external peer-reviewed mechanisms; and developed biostatistical and bioinformatic methodologies for clinical trial design, high-dimensional data analysis, and experimental design.
Dr. Shyr is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee voting member. He has published more than 450 peer-reviewed papers in a variety of journals (h-index = 92). Dr. Shyr was the member of the US National Academy of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Policy Issues in the Clinical Development of Biomarkers for Molecularly Targeted Therapies. He has served as a member of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) Developmental Therapeutics Study Section, Cancer Immunopathology and Immunotherapy Study Section and the Population and Patient-oriented Training Study Section. Dr. Shyr was the co-course director for the AACR/ASCO Methods in Clinical Cancer Research Vail Workshop. He is the Associate Editor for JAMA Oncology, Journal of Thoracic Oncology (JTO), and the Statistical Advisory Board Member for PLoS ONE. In addition, Dr. Shyr is the principle investigator of the NCI U01 grant of Barrett’s esophagus translational research network coordinating center (BETRNetCC). Dr. Shyr’s current research interests focus on developing statistical bioinformatic methods for analyzing next-generation sequencing data based on single cell technology including a series of papers on estimating the sample size requirements for studies conducting DNA and RNA sequencing analysis.

Abstract: The key concepts of precision medicine are prevention and treatment strategies that take individual molecular profile and clinical information into account. Single-cell next-generation sequencing technologies (NGS), liquid biopsy for circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) analysis, microbiomics, radiomics, and other types of high-throughput assays have exploded in popularity in recent years, thanks to their ability to produce an enormous volume of data quickly and at relatively low cost. The emergence of these big data has advanced the goals of precision medicine; however, across the entire continuum of big data capture and utilization, many more challenges lie ahead—from analysis of high-throughput biomarkers to maximum exploitation of the electronic health record (EHR), to the ultimate goal of clinical guidance based on a patient’s genome.

In recent years, almost all top biomedical journals have published major findings using advanced data science technologies, including complex statistical modeling, machine learning, and AI. Interpreting these results for patients and applying them for clinical guidance, however, remain significant challenges.

In this presentation, I will offer some perspectives on the changing landscape for precision medicine, including the road map for choosing between statistical modeling and machine learning; the concept of treating unstructured text as quantitative data; the need for physicians to adapt their mindset around the explosive growth in information technology; machine learning; and the AI revolution. These areas present great opportunities for medical researchers to strengthen their role in precision medicine. I will finish up with some thoughts about future medical developments, including how to design and conduct pivotal trials, pragmatic trials, and real-world evidence studies in the precision medicine era.

Prof. Satoshi Matsuoka
Director
RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS)

Dr. Motoi Okuda
Deputy Head of Kobe Centre
RIST

Prof Satoshi Matsuoka:

Satoshi Matsuoka had been a Full Professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2000, and the director of the joint AIST-Tokyo Tech. Real World Big Data Computing Open Innovation Laboratory (RWBC-OIL) since 2017, and will become a Specially Appointed Professor at Tokyo Tech starting 2018 along with his directorship at R-CCS. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Tokyo in 1993.

He has been the leader of the TSUBAME series of supercomputers that have won many accolades such as world #1 in power-efficient computing. He also leads various major supercomputing research projects in areas such as parallel algorithms and programming, resilience, green computing, and convergence of big data/AI with HPC.
He has written over 500 articles according to Google Scholar, and chaired numerous ACM/IEEE conferences, including the Program Chair at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC13) in 2013. He is a Fellow of the ACM and European ISC, and has won many awards, including the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 2006, presented by his Highness Prince Akishino; the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2011; the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2012; the 2014 IEEE-CS Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award, the highest prestige in the field of HPC; and recently HPDC 2018 Achievement Award from ACM.

Dr. Motoi Okuda:

Present Work
· Deputy Head of Research Organization for Information Science & Technology (RIST) KOBE center
– Planning and management of HPCI project and Post K computer resource management and user support
Work Experience
· In Fujitsu Ltd. as Executive Architect of Technical Computing Solutions Unit
– The FJ supervisor of national projects such as K computer project and National Grid projects and planning, marketing, and support activities of HPC business
– Development of computational science and engineering applications, such as CFD, crash worthiness, and MD.
– Project leader of Parallel Computing Center of Fujitsu Lab.
Education
· Ph.D., Information Science : Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
· Master of Nuclear Engineering : Nagoya University.

Dr. Ittetsu Inuzuka
Associate Senior Researcher, Computational and Mathematical Engineering Department, IHI Corporation

Bio: Dr Ittetsu Inuzuka is Associate Senior Researcher in Computational and Mathematical Engineering Dept. at IHI Corporation. He has attended to CFD and DEM simulations and optimizations using HPC for several products such as coastal structures, bulk handling facilities, aircraft engines, etc.

Abstract: IHI Corporation is a heavy-industry manufacturer across the comprehensive areas such as power generation, social infrastructure, turbochargers, Aero Engines, and so on. Nowadays, high performance computing (HPC) becomes increasingly essential to development and design of various products in all of our areas. There are two major roles of HPC in our product development. The first is to reveal physical phenomenon and their mechanisms in and around the product. For this role, a high-precision and high-resolution numerical analysis is required. The result is helpful for improvement or troubleshooting. The second is to evaluate a great number of cases which have each shape or condition parameters in a shorter time. According to these results, interaction between parameter and performance becomes clear. And the design optimization can be performed in a reasonable time. In this presentation, some samples of our research and product development using HPC as above two roles and future view are introduced.

Dr. Ryutaro Himeno
Coordinator
Head office for Information Systems and Cybersecurity Research and Development Group, RIKEN

Bio: Ryutaro HIMENO received the B.E. and the M.E. from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan in 1977 and 1979, respectively. He received Doctor of Engineering degree from the University of Tokyo in 1988. In 1979, he joined Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., where he has been engaged in the research of applying Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis to the car aerodynamic development. In 1998, he joined RIKEN. He had been a director of Advanced Center for Computing and Communication for about 12 years until 2018 and now he is a coordinator of Research and Development Group in the Head office for Information Systems and Cybersecurity. He is also a visiting Professor at Hokkaido University, Chiba University, Tokyo University of Science and a few others. His research area is Computational Fluid Dynamics and Sports Biomechanics.

Abstract: In many years, biological adaptation rules have been studied only through observation and experiments. When an organ or individual changes its shape to adapt to some fluid dynamic factors, only shape changes are observed but it is not clear which factors it adapts to. Genetic algorism(GA) is a numerical optimization method imitating organic revolution. We investigate human blood tube adaptation using Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) and GA on a supercomputer. Key technology to perform this study is how to reduce turn-around time of one optimization, which is parallelization of CFD computation and efficient parallel execution algorism of each CFD jobs of the same generation.
Branch part of the carotid artery is selected as a target because its shape has a wide variety in each person. The artery shape going to the face is fixed and also the position of inlet and outlet are fixed. Optimization target is only the artery going to the brain. After starting with randomly generated artery shapes, optimization of selected two factors out of six: maximum Wall Shire Stress(WSS), minimum WSS, minimum WSSG(gradient), WSSTG(temporary gradient), minimum local radius, is performed using GA and CFD. Then comparing the final optimized shape with actual person’s 7 different shape, we can know how they matches each other. After performing all optimization cases with six combination of assumed factors, the best correspondence is the case with minimum WSS and minimum local radius. As the results, it is clear that the artery should adapt to minimizing WSS and radius at the same time and this approach can be applied to find other biological adaptation rules.

Dr. Nobuyasu Ito
Dr., Department of Applied Physics
Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo and Riken Center for Computational Science

Bio: Nobuyasu Ito got Doctor of Science from the University of Tokyo in 1991 for a thesis entitled “Monte Carlo study on Ising model”. He has been working with supercomputers: starting from S810, VP400, SX1 and XMP, and reaching to ES, K and Post-K, though he once constructed Ising machines. Game is widespread from molecule to society: ferromagnet, heat conduction, hydrodynamics and turbulent flow, plasma, flock, ecoevolution, traffic flow, stock market, and so on. He is virtually a statistical physicist, and he loves simplicity and universality. So he hope to make the current complex global social and economic system simple: we cannot change the law of motion, but we can replace our law!

Abstract: Social models and simulations are achieving a big leap: they are now not only simulating what we are seeing but also showing dream beyond our imagination. In this talk, recent development of social simulations with supercomputers are given. Some examples of traffic analysis, economics, evacuation and disaster control will be shown. Computational road maps are to be discussed.

Prof. Francis Lee
Vice President
Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network

Bio: Bu Sung Lee received his B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD from the Electrical and Electronics Department, Loughborough University of Technology. He is currently an Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang technological University. He held concurrent position as Director of HP Lab Singapore from 2010-2012. He holds a consultant position as Director, International Networks at National SuperComputing Center (Singapore) since 2015.
Bu Sung Lee has been actively involved in research and education community. He is the founding President of Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN), 2003-2007 and currently the Vice-President of SingAREN. He is the Chair of the Trans EurAsia Information Network cooperation center(TEIN*CC) advisory committee, since 2018, which manages the [email protected] EU AID grant, Euro 20 million. Globally, he is a member of the Global Network Architecture Policy and Strategy WG.
Bu-Sung Lee has published widely in the field of computer network and distributed system. He is the co-author of a number of Best Paper. He hold a number of patents with NTU and HP.

Abstract: Core infrastructures are important for research and collaboration. One of these core infrastructure is the high-speed network especially in the current era of BIG DATA. Singapore and Japan researchers have the privilege of a 100 Gbps link, which has been used to support the collaboration. The high-speed network has enabled researchers to carry out demonstrations together at major conference, eg SuperComputing17 and SC18. This talk will provide some insight to the growth of the SG-JP high-speed network and how high-speed research network is growing globally.

Dr. Jernej Zidar
Scientist
Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR

Bio:  Jernej obtained his diploma in Biochemistry in 2005. In his PhD that he defended in 2010, he focused on the aggregation propensity of lipids in lipid bilayers and amyloid protein beta. In 2011 he moved to the Institute of High Performance Computing, where he was studying the dynamics of antimicrobial polymers, this project was followed by several collaborations with industry. In his career he specialized both in molecular dynamics of large macromolecular assemblies and forcefield parameter development.

Abstract: Skin is the largest organ of the human body and is responsible for keeping a barrier between the inside and the outside world, while at the same time maintaining a selective permeability. Consequently, the skin is also a very complex organ that is challenging to study at an experimental level. Computational studies can give insights into the atomistic and mechanistic details of the processes involved in the permeability phenomena, yet they have their challenges because the researcher needs to account for differences in skin composition related to gender, age and race. It is also necessary to decide whether to simulate with full details or a slightly coarse grain approach is enough to observe the desired phenomenon such us binding, permeation or disruption of the model skin. At the hardware level, the challenge is to get good performance which is a delicate interplay between the number of nodes used, scheduling and the interconnect used. Our results indicate for simulations of the skin one should often employ fewer computer nodes than pure intuition would suggest. The added benefit of this approach is jobs starting faster.

Dr. Denis Bauer
Head Cloud-computing, Bioinformatics
CSIRO

Bio:  Dr. Denis Bauer is an internationally recognised expert in machine learning, specifically in processing big genomic data to help unlock the secrets in human DNA. Her achievements include developing an open-source, artificial intelligence-based cloud-service that accelerates disease research and contributes to national and international initiatives for genomic medicine funded with over $500M. Dr. Bauer holds a BSc from Germany and PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Queensland, and has completed postdoctoral research in both biological machine learning and high-throughput genetics. She has 34 peer-reviewed publications (15 as first or senior author), with over 1000 citations and an H-index 15

Abstract: Australia is the seventh healthiest country and has ambitions to becoming the healthiest nation by 2030, with precision medicine and genomics in particular one of the main contributors. Dr. Bauer outlines Australia’s national and state-based genomic health initiatives, which all leapfrogged to the forefront of cloud technology.
As part of these initiatives, the CSIRO developed VariantSpark a Spark-based machine learning frameworks, which was custom designed to deal with ‘wide’ or ultra-high-dimensional data (80 million columns) and demonstrated on a 22,000 whole genome cohort. VariantSpark is running on the SuperCloud, as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure through a notebook portal.
The talk concludes by discussing a new cloud architecture, serverless, pitted to become an $8 Billion market for its ability to make analysis more economical; akin to how prefabrication scaled up the construction sector over bricklaying. The talk illustrates, how “serverless beacon” accelerates rare disease research by enabling even smaller laboratories to stand up a genome querying service (Beacon) and share data cost-effectively while maintaining privacy and data ownership.

Asst Prof Mengling ‘Mornin’ Feng
Assistant Professor
SSHSPH NUS

Bio: Dr. Mengling Feng (http://www.mornin-feng.com) is currently an Assistant Professor at Institute for Data Science, National University of Singapore, and the Senior Assistant Director of National University Hospital championing the big data analytics efforts. Dr Feng is also an affiliated scientist with the Lab of Computational Physiology, Harvard-MIT Health Science Technology Division. His research is to develop machine learning algorithms to extract actionable knowledge from large amount of data to enable better quality of healthcare. His research brings together concepts and tools across deep learning, optimization, signal processing, statistical causal inference and big data management. Dr. Feng’s work was recognized by both well-established journals, such as Science Translational Medicine, JAMA and top international conferences, such as KDD, AAAI, MICCAI and AMIA. His team recently ranked number 2 in an international challenge on AI tools for medical image analysis. Dr. Feng works closely with clinicians aiming to develop and deploy the right AI solutions for more effective and cost-efficient care.

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undoubtable one of the most popular buzzwords recently. Despite AI’s success in the other domains, such as finance, automobile, manufacturing, etc, AI’s impacts to healthcare remains debatable. Our Singapore government actually believes that AI can help to augment and transform our current healthcare system. Thus, we have invested substantially to boost the development of AI technologies especially for healthcare. In this talk, I am going to share some of our ongoing projects, where we see AI technologies may contribute to the advancement of Precision Medicine.

Dr. Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda
Professor of Ohio State University
and Founder of MVAPICH

Bio:  DK Panda is a Professor and University Distinguished Scholar of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. He has published over 450 papers in the area of high-end computing and networking. The MVAPICH2 (High Performance MPI and PGAS over InfiniBand, Omni-Path, iWARP and RoCE) libraries, designed and developed by his research group (http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu), are currently being used by more than 2,950 organizations worldwide (in 85 countries). More than 524,000 downloads of this software have taken place from the project’s site. This software is empowering several InfiniBand clusters (including the 3rd, 14th, 17th, and 27th ranked ones) in the TOP500 list. The RDMA packages for Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop and Memcached together with OSU HiBD benchmarks from his group (http://hibd.cse.ohio-state.edu) are also publicly available. These libraries are currently being used by more than 300 organizations in 35 countries. More than 29,200 downloads of these libraries have taken place. High-performance and scalable versions of the Caffe and TensorFlow framework are available from https://hidl.cse.ohio-state.edu. Prof. Panda is an IEEE Fellow. More details about Prof. Panda are available at http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~panda.

Abstract: This talk will start with an overview of challenges being faced by the AI community to achieve scalable and distributed DNN training on Modern HPC systems. After that, the talk will focus on a range of solutions to address these challenges. The solutions will include: 1) MPI-driven Deep Learning, 2) Co-designing Deep Learning Stacks with High-Performance MPI, 3) Out-of-core DNN training, 4) Accelerating TensorFlow on HPC Systems, 5) Accelerating Big Data Stacks, and 6) Efficient Deep Learning over Big Data.

Dr. Derek Wang
Chief Cloud Architect of Alibaba Cloud international
Alibaba

Bio:  Dr. Derek Wang is the Chief Cloud Architect of Alibaba Cloud international, and is leading the global technical team distributed in several regions, including US, Europe, ASEAN, ANZ, MENA, North Asia and India. His team is responsible for high quality solution design and service delivery in terms of cloud and big data, AI and IOT, to ensure the success of all customers in building applications on top of the Alibaba Cloud platform, has several big data related patents. He is also leading the middle office teams of international IDC planning, strategic projects management, consulting services, product requirements management, training and certification, key projects delivery.

Abstract: TBC

Moderator: Dr. Christine Ouyang, IBM

Panellist:

Mr. George Loh, Director, Programmes, National Research Foundation
Ms. Stephanie Hung, Senior Vice President, ST Engineering Electronics
Dr. Qi Gao, Senior Scientist at Mitsubishi Chemical Group, Science and Technology Research Center
Prof. Dennis Polla, Professor, A*STAR

Mr. George Loh

Mr. George Loh graduated from The Ohio State University, USA with a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering in 1986 and The University of Southern California, in 1995 with a Masters degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Mr Loh spent more than 20 years from in the defence industry as a government employee from 1989- 2011. He was responsible for large scale systems integration and acquisition of defence systems as well as for formulation of defence R&D strategy and for technology management of defence R&D programs. He was awarded the Defence Technology Training Award in 1993 to pursue a Master of Science degree in Industrial Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California, USA. George Loh was the Deputy Head, Defence Technology Office (United States) at the Embassy of Singapore in Washington DC from Mar 2003 to Oct 2006. He was responsible for defence technology cooperation including the US DoD, Military Services, research institutes and universities. In Nov 2006, Mr Loh was appointed the the Head (Maritime Systems), Defence Research & Technology Office in Ministry of Defence to develop the Research and Technology (R&T) portfolio in Maritime Systems. He was also responsible to formulate the policy and long-term investment strategy for defence R&T as well as to build-up indigenous maritime-related capabilities in the local defence ecosystem. George Loh, Director (Programmes), joined National Research Foundation in Oct 2011 and was responsible for the development of the scientific and R&D strategy and R&D capabilities in the ecosystem, in particular in physical sciences and engineering, and for development of the scientific programme with the stakeholders in the government agencies, in the academia and the industry. He manages programmes such as the Corp Lab @ University, National Cybersecurity R&D, and Virtual Singapore to ensure the desired outcomes are achieved.

Ms. Stephanie Hung

An innovative and dynamic leader, Stephanie has over 25 years of working experience in Technology sector at IBM, HP, Microsoft and ST Engineering servicing clients from airlines and airports, banking and financial services institutions, to manufacturing and consumer packaged goods industry, and public sectors accumulated many years industry knowledge in the business and IT transformation journey. She has been business advisor in providing business and technology consultancy to companies and startups in striving for the digital transformation, innovation, industrial internet, connectivity, and sustainability. She also serves as a member of the Media Literacy Council under the Ministry of Communications and Information, Singapore to develop public awareness and education on cyber wellness, and advise trends and development pertaining to the Internet and media.

Dr. Qi Gao

Qi Gao has a M.Sc. in Biomolecular Engineering and holds a Ph.D in Biological Resources and Informatics from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. During his Ph.D. Dr. Gao developed a FMO (Fragment Molecular Orbital)-based ab initio method for accurately predicting chemical shifts of large biomolecular systems in short time through using super computing resource. He joined Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation Yokohama Research Center, Japan, as theoretical researcher for ionic liquids, liquid electrolytes and polymers simulations in 2007. While there he played an important role in the validation of polarizable force field to accurately predict thermodynamic, structural and transport properties of ionic liquids. In 2018 with the participation of Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation to the IBM Q Network Hub at Keio university, Dr. Gao became a project researcher of the Hub. His activities at IBM Q hub is to test advanced quantum methods such as quantum chemistry and quantum AI to find areas where quantum computing could make a practical contribution of general utility in Chemistry.

Prof. Dennis Polla

Professor Dennis L. Polla currently serves as the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Programme Director (Special Projects) in Singapore. He has served 11 years in a variety of U.S. government positions including Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he was mainly responsible for MEMS, BioMEMS, and nanotechnology research programs. Prof. Polla subsequently served as Director of Safe and Secure Operations for IARPA. Prof. Polla has spent 30 years in both faculty and administrative positions in multiple departments at the University of California Berkeley, Yale University, and the University Minnesota. He was the former holder of the Earl E. Bakken (Medtronic) Endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering, holder of the W.R. Sweatt (Honeywell) Chair in the Management of Technology, and recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award under President Reagan. He received the DARPA Award for Outstanding Portfolio of Programs in 2008, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 2010, IARPA Special Contribution Award in 2012, and the Office of Director of National Intelligence Exceptional Achievement Award and Medal in 2014.Prof. Polla currently identifies and manages new thematic research programmes at A*STAR. He is responsible for setting the programmatic research strategy for the Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

Moderator: Ms. Yvonne Gao, A*STAR

Panellist:

Prof. Joe Fitzsimons, Founder of Horizon Quantum Computing
Dr. Ewan Munro, Co-Founder of Entropica Labs
Dr. Mark Jackson, Cambridge Quantum Computing

Prof. Joe Fitzsimons

Blind quantum computation and secure delegation
Joe Fitzsimons is a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Quantum Technologies and an Assistant Professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design. By background, Joe is a theoretical physicist with interests in all areas of quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. At present, his research focuses on quantum computation and using quantum phenomena to enable new secure computing functionality. He holds a BSc in theoretical physics from University College Dublin and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. In 2016, Joe was named in MIT Technology Review’s TR35 Innovators Under 35 Asia list.

Dr. Ewan Munro

Ewan is the co-founder of the Singapore-based start-up Entropic Labs, focusing on quantum computing for bioinformatics and genomics. Ewan has a Masters Degree in Mathematical Physics from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD from the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. During his thesis, he worked on the numerical simulation of quantum optical systems.

Dr. Mark Jackson

The Power of Quantum Encryption
Quantum computing presents great opportunity and challenge for encryption and security. This means that a number of defensive, post-quantum encryption solutions must be developed. Such algorithms require certifiably random numbers, producing using quantum entanglement and certified via Bell’s Theorem. CQC has recently produced IronBridge – the first commercially viable way of producing such certifiable QRNG. I will describe the theoretical basis for such random numbers, their use in encryption, and the construction of IronBridge

Dr. Mark Jackson is the received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Columbia University. He then spent 10 years researching superstring theory and cosmology, co-authoring almost 40 technical articles. To promote the public understanding of science, he founded the science crowdfunding platform Fiat Physica and non-profit Science Partnership Fund. He is Adjunct Faculty at Singularity University and a Director of the BoldlyGo Institute.

Mr. Jean-Marc Denis
Distinguished Expert Strategy & Plan, BDS Strategy & Innovation
Chair of the Board, European Processor Initiative

Bio: After five years of research in the development of new solvers for the for Maxwell equations at Matra Defense (France) as a mathematician from 1990 to 1995, Jean-Marc Denis had several technical positions in the HPC industry between 1995 to 2004 from HPC pre-sales to Senior Solution Architect. Since 2004 Jean-Marc has worked at Bull SAS head Quarter (France) where he has started the HPC activity with a few other people. At that time, Bull was not present in the HPC sector. In less than 10 years, the HPC revenue at Bull exploded from nothing in 2004 to 200M€ in 2015, making Bull the undisputed leader of the European HPC industry and the fourth in the world.

From 2011 to the end of 2016, Jean-Marc has led the worldwide business activity with the goal to consolidate the ATOS/Bull position in Europe and to make ATOS/Bull a worldwide leader in Extreme Computing with footprint in Middle-East, Asia, Africa and South America. In 2016 and 2017, Jean-Marc has been in charge of the definition of the strategy for the BigData Division at ATOS/Bull. In his position, his role is to define the global approach for the different BigData business lines covering HPC, Legacy (mainframe), Enterprise computing, DataScience consulting and Software.

Since the beginning of 2018, Jean-Marc is the head of Strategy and Plan at Atos/Bull, in charge of the global cross-Business Unit Strategy and of the definition of the 3 years business plan. Since the middle of 2018, Jean-Marc has been also elected as Chair of the Board of the European Processor Initiative (EPI).

Abstract: The general objective of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) partnership is to design a roadmap for future European low power processors for extreme scale computing, high-performance big-data and emerging applications like automotive and other fields that require a highly efficient processing infrastructure.

More precisely, EPI aims at establishing a roadmap to reach three fundamental goals:

1) Developing low-power processor technology to be included in a pre-exascale system for Europe in 2020-2021 and exascale in 2022-2023;
2) Ensuring that a significant part of that technology is European;
3) Ensuring that the application areas of the technology are not limited only to HPC, but cover other areas, like high-end edge computing applied to autonomous vehicles of call 4 and 5, thus ensuring the economic viability of the initiative.

In the first section of this talk, the European strategy toward an in-house processor and accelerator ecosystem will be reviewed. In the second section, the development roadmap will be presented as well as some the early high-level specifications.

Mr. Vincenzo Capone
Head of Research Engagement and Support
GÉANT

Bio: Enzo is the Head of the Research Engagement and Support Team in GÉANT, in charge of providing support to pan-European and international scientific groups and collaborations, and of the Science and Research engagement activities for the GÉANT community. With a background in computer science and networking, his previous positions were network architect and manager with the Department of Physics of the University of Naples, in charge of the computing for physics experiments, and Technical Associate to the ATLAS experiment collaboration at CERN and to the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN).

Abstract: This presentation will provide GÉANT’s view on how to shape the European HPC ecosystem, building on our services and the infrastructures we federate, relying on national centres and institutes from Member States. This requires insight in the European landscape on large research infrastructures and their needs with respect to data handling and computing and the needs of the European industry, leading to a balanced and competitive set of services, either already available or to be newly developed.
The contribution will illustrate the future strategy for developing a next-generation network and the set of services that GÉANT will deploy to support Europe in entering in the upcoming Exascale age.

Mr. Israr Sheikh
FAE Manager, South Asia Pacific
Intel Corporation

Bio: Israr Sheikh has been in FPGA industry for more than 19 years with various technical and business roles. In 2009, Israr started as Design Specialist FAE at Intel Programmable Solutions Group (former Altera Corporate), from 2016 Israr is managing PSG FAE organization for South Asia Pacific. In this role, Israr is responsible to work with customer, BU and Sales group to enable FPGA technologies covering Data Centres, Virtualization, Artificial Intelligence and various foundational FPGA based solution & technologies for Intel customers. Israr started his career as FPGA & ASIC design engineer, before joining Intel (formerly Altera), he was FPGA Manager at services company, through this company he worked for NSN, ALU, Motorola, PMC and other clients for providing FPGA based solution for leading telecom technologies.

Abstract: The presentation unveils the Intel FPGA products and platforms that value the flexible and powerful acceleration for popular workloads including AI, Data Analytics, and other HPC applications. How to build efficient FPGA Acceleration workload using tools like Acceleration Stack for Intel® Xeon® CPU with FPGA, Parallel Computing with OpenCL, Intel OpenVINO™ and relevant technologies.

Dr. Jeonghoon Moon
Leader of Network Development Team of KREONET Center, KISTI

&

Mr. Andrew Howard
Cloud Team Manager, National Computational Infrastructure Australia

Dr. Jeonghoon Moon: He is a senior researcher of Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI). KISTI is the national Supercomputing & Advanced Research Network Center in Korea. And, especially, working for Dept. Advanced KREONET Center which is Korea Research Environment Open Network as well as Network Engineering/Operation Center. Interested research areas include in ScienceDMZ & PRP, Network QoS & Network Engineering, Software Defined Network & Future Internet, Cloud Computing & Network Virtualization, Remote Collaboration and so on. Over the past decade, major research projects have focused on Network Resource Management & NSI implementation, StarLight & GLORIAD project in Korea, Cloud Computing & Remote Collaboration. Since 2015, focusing on ScienceDMZ & PRP/NRP project for development & deploy, expansion & activation in Korea. For especially, collaboration with NERSC/ESnet for Peta Scale DTN transfer project based on the 100GE environment between international. And also chair of APRP(Asia Pacific Research Platform) WG at APAN Meeting.

Mr. Andrew Howard: Andrew has over four decades of hands-on technical, diplomatic and logistics experience covering a wide range of standard and bespoke technologies, languages, networks and applications within Industry, Government, Academia and Research nationally and internationally. He is a member of the APAN Program Committee, Co-Chair of the APAN E-Culture and Asia Pacific Research Platform working groups and the Lead judge on the SCA19 Data Movement Challenge. Through his work on the InfiniCortex and InfiniCloud projects, Andrew has designed and delivered the next generation of high speed data transfer and distributed computation throughout the Asia Pacific region and around the world.

Abstract: Global big data and data-intensive research areas trend have been growing rapidly and widely. according to this trend, big data issues of the next generation of science and scientific applications have to include globally distributes data center and how can collaboration such as Exabyte Scale. In order to make a new environment for big data research areas, we suggest that ScienceDMZ as a big data freeway. A number of APAN members have started deploying ScienceDMZ’s based on the utilization of Data Transfer nodes. The goal is to share our experience with the members and to propose the establishment of an APRP which will be part of the GRP (Global Research Platform).
– Promote HPC ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific.
– Engage APAN members and ASEAN countries
– Towards the setting up an Asia Pacific Research Platform (APRP) and become a part of a Global Research Platform.

Mr. Vincent Quah
Regional Head – Education, Research, Healthcare and Not-For-Profit Organizations, APAC Global Public Sector
Amazon Web Services

Bio: Vincent Quah is the Regional Head for Education, Research, Healthcare and Not For Profit sectors for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. He is responsible for sales and business development with education institutions/schools, research, healthcare and not-for-profit organizations. He works with senior management officials, educators and students, research scientists and non-for-profit personnel in leveraging AWS Cloud services to save costs, accelerate innovation, and increase organizational agility that better serve their missions.

Abstract: High Performance Computing (HPC) allows scientists and engineers to solve complex, compute-intensive problems and HPC applications often require high network performance, fast storage, large amounts of memory, very high compute capabilities or all of these. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Intel enable you to increase the speed of research and reduce time-to-results by running HPC in the cloud and scaling to larger numbers of parallel tasks that would be practical in most on-premises environments. Research organizations around the world enjoy reduced computing costs by leveraging on servers on-demand, optimized for specific applications – all without the need for large capital investments.

In this session, we will share how our customers have leveraged the agility and scalability of cloud computing to achieve their scientific goals in new and exciting ways. Attendees will witness how to harness the potential of Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Software tools capabilities on AWS instances (C5, C5n) and learn how to parallelize, vectorise and modernize their code to build fast, reliable and scalable solutions for HPC to AI. Get on the path to Exascale and beyond with Intel & AWS in HPC.

Mr. Jay Hiremath
Corporate Vice President, Platform and Software Engineering
AMD

Bio: Jay Hiremath leads the platform and software engineering team for AMD EPYC™ Server Processors. He has over twenty five years experience in the technology industry, with the past ten focused on the HPC platform and software engineering.

Abstract: Momentum is building for AMD’s HPC business, with a growing number of customers announcing deployments using the AMD EPYC™ 7000 Series Processor. Come learn about the latest updates to the AMD EPYC™ Server Processor product line and AMD Software for HPC.

Dr. Yang Jian
Fellow, ASIC and Layout Design
AMD

Bio: Dr. Yang Jian has graduated from CAG&CG State Key Lab with Ph.D. in 2002. He previous industry experiences included several IC companies on 3D graphics acceleration, Trident Multimedia Co. Ltd, Centrality Communications Co. Ltd and S3 Graphics Co Ltd. In 2006 Dr Yang joined ATI/AMD. Dr Yang has built up a strong team on performance verification, analysis and optimization of modern GPUs. The team has completed more than 40 ASICs’ tape-out. Dr Yang is concentrating on computer architect of HPC and Artificial Intelligence and deep learning algorithm optimization and ROCm open-source platform and HPC apps from AMD.

Abstract: AMD speeds up the HW/SW platforms for virtualization, HPC and machine intelligence with 7nm CPU ROME and 7nm GPU MI60&MI50. AMD RADOEN INSTICTTM MI60 has 7.4 FP64 computing capability, 64GB/s bandwidth PCIe Gen4 and 200GB/s infinite fabric Links. ROCm over OpenUCX provides short latency and high transmission bandwidth for MIP intranode and internode communications. Rapid evolution of ROCM open source software stack supports rapid HPC apps’ porting and many machine intelligence frameworks. Many Math libraries and various machine intelligence primitives are developed and optimized in ROCm on AMD RADOEN INSTICTTM GPUs. AMD is working with many partners to promote ROCm for computing marketing.

Mr. Rob Futrick
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Azure Compute (HPC)

Bio: Rob Futrick is a principal program manager on the Azure Compute team, focusing on hybrid & cloud HPC and the product lead for the Azure CycleCloud HPC orchestration tool. Rob was previously a co-founder and CTO of Cycle Computing, which Microsoft acquired in 2017. He was responsible for driving Cycle Computing’s technology and product vision, with a particular focus on enabling highly scalable cloud and hybrid HPC solutions for customers. As a cloud user since 2007, he brings a unique perspective to the challenges that large-scale cloud computation presents.

Abstract: In this talk, we will take an in-depth and interactive look at the platforms of hardware, software, and services that enable Azure to drive today’s most challenging compute workloads. Attendees will get first-hand view into architectures such as Autonomous Driving, EDA circuit design, and others, illustrating how cloud technologies come together into full HPC solutions.

Mr. Shaowen Ma
Director, Ethernet Switches, APAC
Mellanox Technologies Ltd.

Bio: Shaowen is the Product director of APAC at Mellanox. He is responsible for Product/Solution requirements in Switching business across APAC. He works with US/APAC major OTT/SP/Ent customers for the past 18 years. Also, he is an active speaker SDN/NFV in many APAC meetings such as Apricot and SDN Summit etc.

Recently His focus includes Hyperscale Data Centre, Telco Cloud, Automation, and OTT network architecture. He has also deep dive knowledge on EVPN/VXLAN/ Segment Routing, also SDN Controller like Contrail/ACI and NSX etc. Previously, Shaowen was Product director from Juniper and Sr. Product Manager from Cisco.

Abstract: Traditional data centre focus on Computing, Storage and network. With more and more ML/AI application drive GPU/SSD and AI AISC into data centre. The traffic pattern and lossless requirement dramatically change the DC design. More and more data centre will introduce intelligence QOS and buffer management for RoCEv2.

Mellanox working with some industry leader design the next generation chipset/system and management system to meet the AI/ML critical business applications. In this session, we will introduce with details on some of these exciting technologies.

Dr. Bill Nitzberg
CTO, PBS Works, Altair
Altair

Bio: Dr. Bill Nitzberg is the CTO of PBS Works at Altair. With over 25 years in the computer industry, spanning commercial software development to high-performance computing research, Dr. Nitzberg is an internationally recognized expert in parallel and distributed computing. He served on the board of the Open Grid Forum, co-architected NASA’s Information Power Grid, edited the MPI-2 I/O standard, and has published numerous papers on distributed shared memory, parallel I/O, PC clustering, job scheduling, and cloud computing. When not focused on HPC, Bill tries to improve his running economy for his long-distance running adventures.

Abstract: At the heart of ‘what is HPC?’ and ‘what is AI?’ is a common pursuit: taking today’s technology and pushing it further, to the boundary of what is possible. In fact, if something can be done easily today, it’s not considered HPC, and it’s not AI. It’s just engineering.
The future is bringing these two pursuits together, using each to advance the other: scaling up AI calculations by integrating tightly with HPC technologies, and making HPC more efficient and effective by leveraging AI techniques. The future of computing combines HPC and AI for Exascale, for Cloud, and for Green Computing.

Mr. Sridhar Dharmarajan (DS)
Managing Director, Indo-Pacific Region
MSC Software Corporation

Bio: Mr. Dharmarajan is Managing Director at MSC Software Corporation for the Indo-Pacific Region and responsible for operations across India, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand. He joined MSC in 2007 establishing the company’s first sales office in the region. Over the past decade, he has built and retained high performing teams he has been responsible for the company’s market leadership and 10x growth. Before MSC Software Corporation, between 2002-2006 Mr. Dharmarajan was responsible for successfully setting up the MatrixOne operations in India.

Between 2000-2002, he was a successful entrepreneur who set up two companies – Bluefont Technologies and Pixtel communications; Pixtel being sold to Mindtek of Taiwan. It is during this time Mr. Dharmarajan acquired an in-depth knowledge of setting up and running a software company end-to-end. Mr. Dharmarajan started his career with Wipro Infotech. After Wipro, at the beginning of 1992, he was handpicked to be a part of a core team to establish SDRC (now Siemens PLM) in India. During his eight-year tenure at SDRC, he was the recipient of numerous technical & sales excellence awards and played a vital role in the success of SDRC in the country. Mr. Dharmarajan completed his MS in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. He is based in Bangalore and calls the garden city his home.

Abstract: As the requirements from product design are getting more challenging every year due to fast-changing customer needs, improved quality and efficiency, ever increasing regulations, faster time to market, and new trends in manufacturing, organizations are moving more and more towards virtual engineering to get the products first-time-right. To achieve this, that is, to engineer reality in the virtual platform, one needs to capture the increased complexities by combining various physics, using complex material models, and virtually testing under realistic scenarios to optimize the design. These require increased computing power and methods standardized to deliver the results fast and consistently. This presentation showcases the methods adopted by global leaders to achieve the same and how it is now being made available to the global engineering community.

Mr. Ben Di Qual
WW Infrastructure Technical Lead
Microsoft Intelligent Cloud

Bio: Ben is the WW Infrastructure Technical Lead in the Intelligent cloud CTO team. He specializes in HPC, Migration, Management and data management. He works deeply with Microsoft’s Azure Engineering team on product features and strategy, ensuring they are customer-centric in design. Since joining Microsoft a little over five years ago Ben has been involved in driving Azure customer adoption and platform development. He has worked as an executive sponsor and been involved with the C level teams at some of Microsoft’s most advanced cloud customers. Prior to Microsoft Ben worked in technical leadership and architecture roles in large solution integrators as well as financial services and healthcare customers.

Abstract: Will FPGA revolutionize how you do research? What if you could expand your Cray on demand? How will Quantum Computing radically change the future? Come hear what the future of HPC on Cloud holds for you, what possibilities this creates for new research avenues as well as what are some of the challenges, trade-offs limitations as these new technologies emerge.

Mr. Andrew Underwood
Asia-Pacific Chief Technology Officer – HPC & AI
Dell EMC

Bio: Andrew Underwood is the Asia-Pacific Chief Technology Officer for Dell EMC high performance computing and artificial intelligence systems.  As customer focused technologists, his team works with end-customers, channel partners, and global systems integration specialists to accelerate clients scientific advancement and global economic competitiveness using high-performance computing and artificial intelligence technologies.

Abstract: The health care industry is expected to be an early adopter of AI and deep learning to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, and speed up diagnosis. This talk explores the innovations that scientific collaboration between Dell EMC, Intel and our life science customers who are focused on leveraging deep learning to drive human progress.

Dr. Kostas Glinos
European Commission, Directorate General for Research & Innovation

Bio: Kostas works at the European Commission, Directorate General for Research & Innovation, where he leads a team responsible for EU international cooperation policy in STI and for relations with European Economic Area countries, Switzerland, Russia, Western Balkans, Turkey, all of Asia,
Australia and New Zealand. Kostas has been developing EU policy and managing R&D programmes in the area of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) in Brussels since 1992. Policy areas he has dealt with include open science and innovation,
collaboration in research, industry-academia interaction, the governance of research commons, the role of public-private partnerships, science diplomacy and international cooperation policy at bilateral and biregional level. At various points in time, he has been responsible for funding programmes in future and emerging technologies, cyber-physical systems, ICT research infrastructure and big research data. In the
academic year, 2017-2018 Kostas was a visiting Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

Before joining the Commission Kostas worked in the chemical industry in the USA and Belgium, lectured at the University and carried out research in Greece. He holds a PhD in engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an Advanced Professional Certificate in investment
management from Drexel University in the USA.

Abstract: Sharing across countries digital research infrastructures and resources, such as HPC and data, requires cooperation and alignment between national systems and actors and result in transnational communities and governance structures. The EU has been growing its regional infrastructure for research for almost 30 years, interconnecting countries and equiping their researchers with resources and capabilities they would not otherwise have. It is eager to share this experience with other regional organisations, such as ASEAN, as it believes that international cooperation and developing regional – or even global – science commons is the way forward. The Policy Exchange Platform, an initiative supported under E-READI, can support and stimulate this process.

Prof. Rodney Van Meter
Associate Professor at Keio University

Bio: Rodney Van Meter received a B.S. in engineering and applied science from the California Institute of Technology in 1986, an M.S. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California in1991, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Keio University in 2006. His current research centers on quantum computer architecture and quantum networking. Other research interests include storage systems, networking, and post-Moore’s Law computer architecture. He is now an Associate Professor of Environment and Information Studies at Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus. He is the Vice Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Governance, and the Vice Center Chair of Keio’s new Quantum Computing Center. Dr. Van Meter is a member of AAAS, ACM and IEEE.

Abstract: Existing quantum computers are still error-prone machines, limiting the length of compilations that can be conducted successfully. Compilers have a large impact on the success rate of programs. As different qubits on a computer have different characteristics, a compiler that is error-aware can assign frequently-used variables to the higher-quality locations within the machine. We have developed beam search-based heuristics that substantially improve predicted success probability over unaware techniques, and evaluated them on the IBM 20-qubit machines,

Mr. Philippe Duluc
Chief Technology Officer
Atos Big Data & Security

Bio: Philippe Duluc is the Chief Technology Officer of Atos Big Data & Security, also Distinguished Expert and member of the Atos Scientific Community.

Philippe Duluc graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris (France), initially working as a military engineer, for the French Ministry of Defense and for the Prime minister’s office. After 20 years of public service, he joined the private sector, first as Chief Security Officer for Orange Group, then as manager of Cybersecurity operations in Bull company. He is now CTO of Atos’ Big Data & Security Division. He has been an adviser to the European Network and Information Security Agency, and has a keen interest in scientific and technical domains involved in digital transformation: cryptography, cyber-defense, advanced computing, data science, artificial intelligence, and promising quantum technologies.

Abstract: TBA

Prof. Lloyd Hollenberg
University of Melbourne

Bio: Lloyd Hollenberg is the inaugural Thomas Baker Chair at the University of Melbourne, and Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology. He completed his PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1989 and moved fields to quantum computing in 1999. He has published over 200 papers, and his contributions include the development of quantum computer architectures and device concepts based on donors spins in silicon, large-scale simulation of quantum circuits, and the implementation of quantum sensors based on defect centres in diamond. His work has been recognised by a number of awards, and he was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2018.

Abstract: TBA

Prof. Mile Gu
Complexity Institute at Nanyang Technological University and the Centre for Quantum Technologies

Bio: Mile Gu is a National Research Foundation Fellow, and holds dual positions the Complexity Institute at Nanyang Technological University and the Centre for Quantum Technologies. He heads the quantum and complexity science initiative – which seeks to explore how quantum technologies can help us understand the science of complex systems (www.quantumcomplexity.org). Gu past research span the areas of quantum information, complexity theory and optical quantum computation, and has been featured in Science and Natural suite Journals on five separate occasions. Prior to his current appointment, Gu obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Queensland, and spent three years as faculty at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences Tsinghua University.

Abstract: TBA

Dr. Shaohan Hu
Research Staff Member, IBM Q

Bio: Dr. Shaohan Hu is a Research Staff Member at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include cyber-physical systems, mobile ubiquitous computing, crowd and social sensing, big data analytics, cloud computing, and quantum computing.

Abstract: TBA

Prof. Man-Hong Yung
Associate Professor, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech)
Vice Dean of the Shenzhen Institute forQuantum Science and Engineering (SIQSE)

Bio: Dr. Man-Hong Yung is an associate professor of physics at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) located in Shenzhen,China, where he is also the vice dean of the Shenzhen Institute forQuantum Science and Engineering (SIQSE). Currently, he is on subbatical leave for joining Huawei Technologies as the ChiefScientist for quantum algorithms and software.Dr. Yung obtained a bachelor and a master degree in physics at theChinese University of Hong Kong. Then, he moved to the University ofIllinois Urbana-Champaign where he obtained a PhD degree under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Leggett. Next, he joined Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher in the research group of Prof.Alan Aspuru-Guzik. After that, he returned to China and worked as an assistant professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary InformationSciences directed by Prof. Andrew Yao at Tsinghua University, before joining SUSTech in Shenzhen.His recent research interests include quantum simulation, quantum control, quantum machine learning, and applications for near-term quantum devices. He is one of the inventors of the method of variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for simulating quantum chemistry with quantum devices, which has been widely adopted as the main tool for quantum chemistry simulation in the field.

Abstract: TBA

Mr. Brad Evans
Head of Centre Operations
Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Bio: As a member of the Pawsey Senior Management Team, Mr Evans brings decades of IT Service Management and physical IT resource delivery experience to his current role. He works to develop and deliver solid and seamless underpinning infrastructure and services to internal Pawsey staff and external researchers. He is responsible for converting business needs of end users and translating these into specific IT requirements. Mr Evans has developed his skills across federal government, private sector, outsourcing and research environments, thus bringing a wide-ranging set of skills to the table to enable him to develop and deliver required services in a manner which allows the consumers of the services to focus on their area of expertise.

Abstract: Pawsey Supercomputing Centre provides ‘tier 1’ HPC services to researchers from Australia and across the world and they are currently in the early stages of the design and procurement of a new generation of infrastructure with a $70m Australian Federal Government investment. Mr Evans will outline some of the demands made on the underlying infrastructure by an increasingly diverse research community and some of the innovative technical solutions developed to aid in delivering and supporting them. Mr Evans will discuss the centre, how it is configured, the technology employed, some of the struggles experienced, and some of the good news stories since the centre was opened, he will also provide a few lessons he has learned across his career which may provide some insight to others in similar areas of responsibility.

Prof Wen Yong Gang
School of Computer Science and Engineering
NTU

Bio: Dr. Wen Yong Gang is an Associate Professor with School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He also serves as the Associate Dean (Research) at College of Engineering, and the Director of Nanyang Technopreneurship Centre at NTU. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (minor in Western Literature) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA, in 2008. His research interests include cloud computing, green data center, distributed machine learning, blockchain, big data analytics, multimedia network and mobile computing.

Abstract: In this talk, we will share our latest work in transforming data centre operations and management via AI techniques. Our solution aims toward high reliability for business continuity and low cost in energy consumption for data centre. It integrates an industry-grade digital twin for data center, calibrated by an AI agent, with our proprietary model-based reinforcement learning framework, to optimize and automate data centre operations and management. This solution has been deployed at Alibaba since November 2018 and some other trial customers in Singapore, with auditable results to improve data center manageability and reduce energy cost.

Mr. Frank Petit
Senior Sales Manager
APAC DCD Group

Bio: Franck Petit is the Senior Sales Manager APAC at Datacenter Dynamics, a uniquely focused company delivering a world leading series of events across five continents and a powerful global digital media portfolio, including the only global magazine devoted to data center scale IT infrastructure. (www.datacenterdynamics.com).

As a sales professional, Franck has been working within the data center industry for the past 9 years in France, the UK & in Singapore . His achievements include: Launching various DCD events in APAC, helping many APAC based companies to expand their data center business by utilising the DCD Platforms, such as: Delta Electronics, Huawei, Fuji Electric, amongst others, and leading a team of sales professionals.

Franck graduated from the SKEMA Business School in France with a Master of Science in Business Tourism and is now based in Singapore, with his wife and two children.

Abstract: TBA

Mr. Ashrut Ambastha
Senior Staff Solution Architect
Mellanox Technologies, Ltd.

Bio: Ashrut Ambastha is a Sr. Staff Architect at Mellanox responsible for defining network fabric for large scale InfiniBand clusters and high-performance datacentre fabric. He is also a member of the application engineering team that works on product designs with Mellanox silicon devices. Ashrut’s professional interests include network topologies, routing algorithms and phy signal Integrity analysis/simulations. He holds an MSc and MTech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay.

Abstract: This talk is aimed towards professionals interested in discussing the role of up-coming Interconnect technologies and network topologies in the field of HPC and Artificial Intelligence. We will start with analysing the latest “in-network computing” architecture of Mellanox network ASICs and software layers. Discuss network topologies and associated resiliency mechanisms to meet the demands of high-performance, yet flexible computing and AI systems. To conclude, we will also dwell upon a few offloading technologies built into the network components that can be applied to accelerate HPC and cloud-native workloads as well as storage systems.

Mr. Rikky Purbojati,
Research Assistant, Head of HPC-SCELSE

Bio: Rikky Purbojati is the lead of high-performance computing facility in SCELSE, a research centre of excellence hosted in NTU with focuses in complex microbial communities in environmental and engineered systems.

He has over 8 years of experience in managing HPC, and in parallel, over 10 years of experience working as Bioinformatics specialist, specifically environmental genomics. Previously he had worked at First Base Pte. Ltd and NUS for 2 years performing similar role.

One of his primary interest is to accelerate the time-to-result of data analysis, and enabling scientists, Linux-proficient or not, to conduct complex data analysis in a large HPC system. Based on that idea, he has guided the development of SCELSE’s HPC system, including establishing the pipelines and integration of the genomics and the imaging lab.

Abstract: This talk will share a case study of a supercomputer procurement in Singapore. This can be extremely beneficial to rest of the education sector attendees to learn from the pros and cons of the process used on selecting a supercomputer.

Dr. Peter Hofstee
Distinguished Research Staff Member
IBM

Bio: Dr. Peter Hofstee serves as Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Austin Research Laboratory on workload-optimized and hybrid systems. Dr. Hofstee served as the chief architect of the synergistic processor elements in the Cell Broadband Engine (Sony Playstation 3, Roadrunner), he has over 100 patents issued or pending. He serves as a Member of the Advisory Board at Bluebee Holding B.V. He holds degrees in theoretical physics and computer science. He is also a Professor at the Accelerated Big Data Systems Group of the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS/EWI), Delft University of Technology.

Abstract: AI, HPC, and data-intensive applications originating in the cloud are leading to a new generation of computing systems. Illustrating our observations based on the most recent IBM Power systems, this talk will first discuss the synergy between AI and “classic” HPC, and then discuss how new hardware and software technologies can enable systems that will support both compute-, and data-intensive workloads in the multicloud era.

Mr. Howard Weiss
Managing Director
Pacific Teck Limited

Bio: Howard Weiss is an expert on creating solutions for high speed storage utilizing HDDs and SSD/NVMes, job scheduling, interconnect technologies and container-based virtualization. Howard has acted as the Vice President of APAC for global IT companies such as storage/Data Direct Networks, interconnect/Voltaire (now Mellanox), data protection BakBone Software (Quest/Dell). Howard was a co-founder of Cofio Software that has been acquired by Hitachi Data Systems (now Hitachi Vantara). Five years ago Howard Weiss incorporated Pacific Teck with a mission to provide cutting edge products to the APAC supercomputer, machine learning and high-end enterprise market.

Howard has been a key influencer in the design and support of many of the Top500 class supercomputers around APAC, including AIST ABCI, currently the 7th most powerful supercomputer in the world. He also helped improve the scheduling capabilities of the Tokyo Institute of Technology Tsubame 3 system. He also works on some of the largest NVMe solid-state storage projects in APAC including Australia’s CSIRO 2PB all NVMe high speed storage project. Howard is a graduate of the University of Michigan. Fluent in Japanese, Howard has been based in Tokyo for close to 30 years.

Abstract: A key question is how to fully utilize the ever-growing processing power of nodes due to the increase in the number and power of GPUs, how to remove storage bottlenecks with parallel file systems and NVMe drives, and how to run multiple jobs virtualized in a Containers on a node in a parallel environment. Howard Weiss will speak on experiences in supporting the some of the largest supercomputers in Asia Pacific on implementing some of the fastest storage systems, complex job management and running of jobs in a container system that is designed for parallel workloads. The experience leveraged from these projects can enable improved efficiency of computing resources for environments large and small.

Mr. Cheng Jang Thye
Chief Architect and Head, Digital eXperience Center
Fujitsu

Bio: Jang Thye joined Fujitsu Singapore in June 2015 as Chief Architect. In his current role, he is responsible for driving strategic technology initiatives and oversees all aspects of solution and architecture design with various delivery teams to deliver a robust ICT portfolio to customers. With over 20 years of professional experience in the industry, Jang Thye has held numerous positions including Systems Engineer, IT Architect, Senior Business Development Manager, and Systems Architect. Prior to Fujitsu, Jang Thye was Chief Architect at CA Technologies where he led the Asia Pacific/Japan (APJ) Solution Architect team in engaging major accounts in the APJ market. His key focus was driving Mobile Application Technologies, particularly in areas such as security, social networking, and application development in the market. Jang Thye holds a Master of Science (Computer Science and Information Systems) and a Bachelor of Science (First Class Honours) (Computer Science and Information Systems), both from the National University of Singapore. Jang Thye is married and has 2 boys. Outside of work, Jang Thye has multiple interests, such as tennis, badminton, swimming, cycling, violin, harmonica, and Go (WeiQi).

Abstract: This presentation introduces the Fujitsu Digital Annealer, a new architecture inspired by Quantum Computing. The session will discuss the challenges in the need for ever increasing performance and the consideration of new computing technology like Quantum Computing to address such needs. However, the current state of Quantum Computing has not reached the state where it can be readily deployed. Hence, Fujitsu developed digital annealer technology to solve a certain class of combinatorial optimization problems that can be deployed today.

Mr. Atul Vidwansa
General Manager
DDN India & S.E. Asia

Bio: Atul Vidwansa is General Manager for DDN Storage for India & S.E. Asia region. He is HPC industry veteran with more than 15 years of experience in Cluster File Systems, Sun Microsystems and DDN. Atul started his career developing Lustre parallel filesystem and then moved to pre-sales and sales roles. Atul was involved in developing high performance storage solutions and deploying them in number of sites in Australia, Korea, Singapore and India.

Abstract: This talk focuses on I/O requirements of AI & Machine Learning/Deep Learning applications with real-world use cases like Autonomous Vehicles, Medical Imaging and HPC. The talk will include identifying the I/O characteristics and how DDN Storage solves these peculiar problems with a combination of home-grown and open-source technology. Talk with showcase storage solutions for NVIDIA DGX & DGX2 and other popular AI computing platforms.

Mr. Rob Mollard
APAC Senior Data & Storage Technologist
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Bio: Rob has been architecting and implementing data management solutions for more than two decades for many large organisations. Rob has extensive experience architecting Petascale high performance computer systems, high performance file systems, and large-scale persistent storage environments. Rob has designed and delivered ‘Big Data’ storage solutions that have produced measurable real-world outcomes to researchers, enabling them to focus on their science rather than the movement and management of data. Rob has a complete understanding of the end-to-end data path, from data acquisition to data at rest. This knowledge is combined with more than a decade of real world customer experience within the Science, Education and Government sector, working for the CSIRO and iVEC (Pawsey) Supercomputing Centre, designing and implementing their initial Petascale Storage initiative.

Abstract: This session explores the journey of data management now and into the future. Data deluge, data tsunami, data lakes have become common references in todays’ IT world where everything is now data centric thanks to the exponential data growth driven by new scientific instruments, IOT, Edge Computing, Social Media as well as Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence. We will look at how you can unleash the value out of your data but most of all how to efficiently manage, protect, federate and search what has become the most valuable asset for enterprises, governments and individuals…data as many have said is the new IP.

Mr. Nick Parfitt
Senior Global Analyst
DCD Group

Bio: TBA

Abstract: While hyperscale data centers and the technological advances needed to make them possible have been the major news in data center development over the past few years, they represent maybe 6oo from half a million data centers globally. So, what does the wider industry take from the behemoths that can help the smaller data center survive and flourish?

Prof. Chao-Yang Lu
Professor at University of Science and Technology of China

Bio: Chao-Yang Lu was born in November 1982 in Zhejiang, China. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2004, and obtained his PhD in Physics from the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge in 2011. Shortly after being a Fellow of Churchill College, he returned to China and is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, where he focuses on research on scalable quantum photonics, quantum computation, and quantum foundations. He published more than 70 articles in Reviews of Modern Physics, Science, Nature, Nature research journals, PNAS and PRL. His work on quantum teleportation was selected as by IOP Physics World as “Breakthrough of the Year 2015”. His work on single-photon source and boson sampling was selected by Optical Society of American as one of “Optics in 2016” and one of “Optics in 2017”. He has been awarded Young Qianren Talent, Hong Kong Qiushi Outstanding Young Scholars, National Natural Science Fund for Exceptional Young Scholars, First-Class National Natural Science Prize, OSA Fellow, and Fresnel Prize from the European Physical Society.

Abstract: TBA

Prof. Alex Ling
Principal Investigator
Centre for Quantum Technologies

Bio: Alexander Ling is a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore, and he leads a team that aims to bring quantum instruments out of the lab and into field deployment. His team has deployed instruments in diverse environments, ranging from Singapore’s urban fibre networks to satellites in space.

Abstract: TBA

Prof. Charles Lim
Assistant Professor and NRF Fellow (class of 2019) at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Centre for Quantum Technologies
National University of Singapore

Bio: Dr Lim Ci Wen (Charles) is an Assistant Professor and NRF Fellow (class of 2019) at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore. His research is focused on quantum cybersecurity and the theoretical foundations of quantum communication. A key feature of his work is the finite-key security of quantum key distribution. His theoretical results in this direction have enabled the development of practical quantum cryptosystems with quantifiable information security.

Abstract: The grand promise of quantum cryptography is that one can secure information a lot better than conventional methods. One prime example is quantum key distribution, which promises complete security against any adversary if the secret key is transmitted using quantum communication. In other words, you do not need to know your enemy. In this talk, I will present the current results in quantum cryptography and argue that it is still necessary to “know your enemy”, especially if we want to make the technology practical.

Mr. Toshinori Kujiraoka
Sales Manager, APAC HPC Tools
Arm Limited

Bio: Toshinori Kuijraoka is Sales Manager for Arm HPC Tools for APAC region. He is HPC industry veteran with more than 15 years of experience in Sun Microsystems, Appro, Cray, Allinea and Arm. Toshinori has been a key influencer in the solutions business of many of the Top500 class supercomputers around APAC, including Tsubame, KISTI, NCI, Pawsey and PostK. He has also been promoting HPC into Hyperscalers and the enterprises for the demands of HPDA and AI.

Abstract: Arm-based hardware and software products are recent entrants into HPC. The goal is to bring architectural choice back to HPC with Arm-based servers. Already these server-class designs are starting to appear and HPC performance is available. On the software side, Arm is working closely with the growing ecosystem to ensure a mature and robust stack. In this talk, we will discuss the progression of Arm in HPC and macro-trends motivating a shift in architecture for Cloud and Data Center.

A look at the current HPC trends in academia, including key technologies and whether there is a skills gap for designers, builders and operators.

Moderator: Mr. Joshua Au, Head, Data Centre, A*STAR

Panellist:

Mr. Rob Futrick, Principal Program Manager for R&D Compute, Microsoft
Mr. Brad Evans, Head of operations, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
Ms. Jessie Yu, Senior Product Lead, Alibaba Cloud
Prof. Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, Director, Murchison Widefield Array, Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, Curtin University
Mr. Vincent Lim, Senior Facilities Manager, NSCC

Rob Futrick

Rob Futrick is a principal program manager on the Azure Compute team, focusing on hybrid & cloud HPC and the product lead for the Azure CycleCloud HPC orchestration tool. Rob was previously a co-founder and CTO of Cycle Computing, which Microsoft acquired in 2017. He was responsible for driving Cycle Computing’s technology and product vision, with a particular focus on enabling highly scalable cloud and hybrid HPC solutions for customers. As a cloud user since 2007, he brings a unique perspective to the challenges that large-scale cloud computation presents.

A look at the current trend of putting HPC in the cloud.

Moderator: Ms. May-Ann, Executive Director, Asian Cloud Computing Association

Panellist:

Mr. Ben Di Qual, WW Technical Lead, Office of the CTO, Intelligent Cloud, Microsoft
Ms. Jessie Yu, Senior Product Lead, Alibaba Cloud
Mr. Mauro Sauco, Director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud Platform
Dr. Peter Hofstee, Distinguished Research Staff Member, IBM

Ben Di Qual
Ben is the WW Infrastructure Technical Lead in the Intelligent cloud CTO team. He specializes in HPC, Migration, Management and data management. He works deeply with Microsoft’s Azure Engineering team on product features and strategy, ensuring they are customer centric in design.
Since joining Microsoft a little over five years ago Ben has been involved in driving Azure customer adoption and platform development. He has worked as an executive sponsor and been involved with the C level teams at some of Microsoft’s most advanced cloud customers.

Prior to Microsoft Ben worked in technical leadership and architecture roles in large solution integrators as well as financial services and healthcare customers.

Dr. Peter Hofstee
Dr. Peter Hofstee serves as Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Austin Research Laboratory on workload-optimized and hybrid systems. Dr. Hofstee served as the chief architect of the synergistic processor elements in the Cell Broadband Engine (Sony Playstation 3, Roadrunner), he has over 100 patents issued or pending. He serves as a Member of the Advisory Board at Bluebee Holding B.V. He holds degrees in theoretical physics and computer science. He is also a Professor at the Accelerated Big Data Systems Group of the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS/EWI), Delft University of Technology.

AIndustry experts weigh in what does it take to design and build a hyperscale data centre.

Moderator: Mr. Omer Wilson, Senior Director APAC, Digital Realty

Panellist:

Dr. Chong Yoke Sin, Chief, Enterprise Business Group, StarHub
Mr. Christopher Street, Group Chief Marketing Officer, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres
Mr. Hisham Muhammad, Director, Global Solutions Enablement, Equinix
Mr. Ling Chi Yee, Head, Development & Design, Data Center, Ascendas-Singbridge
Mr. Yongsuk Choi, Director, Infrastructure – APAC, Data Center, Facebook

Mr. Christopher Street
Christopher (Chris) Street is Group Chief Marketing Officer of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC). He oversees the company’s global marketing initiatives and strategic account management across the company’s portfolio. He was previously Group General Manager of STT GDC, overseeing the company’s data centre portfolio in Singapore, and was responsible for building services and programmes to support customers’ needs across the STT GDC group.
Chris has been in the internet infrastructure industry for over 20 years, and has built and scale businesses in service provider and end-user environments. Prior to STT GDC, he was at Amazon where he was responsible for the acquisition of strategic technical infrastructure such as network and data centre services across the company’s global footprint. Prior to Amazon, Chris held various positions in the Sales, Marketing and Technical Operations functions at companies such as Switch & Data, AT&T, Equinix and CERFnet.
Chris graduated from Baruch College, NYC, with a Master’s in Business Administration and a Bachelor’s Degree from Indiana University Bloomington, USA.

Mr. Ling Chi Yee
Chi has over 18 years in Asia, UK and New Zealand in Mechanical and Electrical consulting Engineering and Project Management including extensive involvement in the business planning, feasibility, technical due diligence, concept and detailed design, audits, feasibility study and construction management in particular mission critical projects for the Service Provider, Cloud, Banking, Telecommunications and Financial Industry.
He is currently the Head of Development and Design of Data Centres for Ascendas-Singbridge (ASB). In this role, his mandate is to provide the, planning, design and construction subject matter expertise in development of Data Centre and its physical services and systems for ASB. Chi brings a wealth of experience from his service provider, OEM and consultancy background and experience with working in various countries in the APJ region.
His strength is in understanding the business and technical requirements of the Data Centre and melds the needs of these two aspects to come up with the right solution that balances technology with commercial and operational costs. With his mechanical background, he has expert knowledge of Mechanical Engineering systems for Data Centres.
Chi also specializes in Data Centre critical system strategy and planning, TCO analysis, green Data Centre and has developed various Hyperscale/Cloud designs. His experience across the data center lifecycle has resulted in an excellent appreciation of the criticality of operations and the intertwining of design and operations in the Data Centre lifecycle.
Chi is a registered Professional Engineer in Singapore with experience and involvement in over 100 data centers projects around the world.

Mr. Yongsuk Choi
Yongsuk Choi is the Director for Infrastructure for Asia-Pacific at Facebook, where he leads the team responsible for the Infrastructure business including development, management, service and partnerships for Data Centers. Before Facebook, Yongsuk spent twelve years at Yahoo!, most recently as Regional Director for Production Operations. Yongsuk received Masters and Bachelors in Electronic Engineering from KyungHee University, Korea.