Posts filed under 'Technology'
This week, the official opening of a high performance computing centre at the University of Linz took place. The machine is called Mach.
For many reasons, this is an interesting event.
- Firstly, with the cloud being a part of everyday computing infrastructure, one would have thought that high performance computer clusters (at a single location) are somewhat outdated (or only for niche markets). But given the fact that in many scientific disciplines computing power for simulating processes, analysing data, etc. are necessary, there is an increasing need of HPC power. Dieter Kranzlmüller reported that they could “sell” three times the computing power of the Leibnitz computer centre infrastructure in Munich.
- Secondly, three universities unite in order to make this happen: Linz and Innsbruck as key driver with Salzburg as associated player. It is not typical that universities unite!
- Thirdly, in a keynote by Eng Lim Goh (Senior VP Engineering, CTO – SGI), I learned that the Altix UV 1 sells well to scientists as it basically behaves like a “normal” Unix system. Just with really a lot of memory and high performance. Why is this important? The reason is that many researchers – obviously – are experts in their respective fields but not necessarily in computer science and/or in formulating their research models in a parallel way, i.e., a way that is suitable for HPC architectures
- Fourthly, Eng Lim Goh reported that the increased density of integrated circuits makes high performance computers very heavy. So heavy in fact that standard buildings will in the near future not be able to accommodate HPCs!
- Fifthly, if you plan your next HPC investment, you should think about a partner that would be able to collect the enormous heat that is generated by the processors.
The official press release for Mach is available here.
October 19th, 2011
Together with Michael Mürling, I organised a workshop on behalf of Forschung Austria at the Alpbach Technology Forum. It’s theme was “Digital Cities of Tomorrow“.
The workshop was motivated by the fact that we are living in the age of cities: estimations suggest that by the year 2050 over 70 % of the world’s population will be living in cities (BTW: in many countries in Europe we had the moment of urbanisation already in the 1950s). There are many open issues and research questions related to this development, from urban development, transportation and economic development to social services, healthcare, energy, public safety, education and more.
In general the participants (30 overall) agreed that overall the objectives towards smart cities are driven by factors such as sustainability, energy efficiency, high quality of life, safety & security, etc. and that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will (only) serve as enabling technology. Amongst the services that ICT could offer several aspects were mentioned:
- visualization as a communication tool between different parties
- geographic information systems for handling spatio-temporal data
- semantic interoperability of the various data sources to allow a standardized processing
- open data policies enabling communities to create low-cost services
- real-time systems for managing and monitoring huge data volumes in a near real-time manner
- simulation and prediction to enable decisions by stakeholders in a timely manner
- as well as the possibility for new business models enabled by digitized processes.
At the same time the participants pointed out the need to address the vulnerability of connected services e.g. smart meters and to consider the privacy of customers and to take into account the threats post by decentralized autonomous systems.
As a conclusion there was a consensus that technology-only approaches towards smarter cities will not be sufficient to realize these cities. As a basis a holistic approach is needed, considering the different cultures, the willingness to experiment – especially at the level of decision makers -, the constraints in public funding and most prominently the interaction with the citizens (e.g. crowd intelligence, inclusion of local knowledge, open innovation, modern lifestyles of digital natives).
Further details at www.forschungaustria.ac.at
August 26th, 2011
The University of Salzburg, Dept. of Computer Science, organised the 2nd Austrian High Performance Computing Workshop (May 30-31, 2011). There were almost 60 people registered, mostly Austrian, but also including participants from Germany and the U.S.
I think that recent advances in computation enable new methodological approaches in many disciplines. Computer science is a tool for many other disciplines, e.g. physicists, astrologist, and many more. They all are provided with better problem solving capabilities. Exciting times!
And also: the more we establish procedures for simulation, the more we create a corpus of data and results of various methodologies approaches. Cool stuff.
And finally: In his keynote, Esmond G. NG, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory mentioned that GPU will have a great future. At least for the next five years ;-!
June 1st, 2011
Excellent talk by Manfred Bortenschlager (Samsung mobile research, London and “ex” Salzburg Research) on Samsung Bada – an ecosystem for mobile apps (the talk was given this afternoon at the ICT forum of FHSalzburg).
Why yet another eco system?
Some really good links
May 19th, 2011
Together with IBM Salzburg, we are organising a series of events on the theme of making “Salzburg a smarter city”. The first circle took place on Friday, May 13, 2011, and it focused on innovations in traffic. We had around 35 senior experts from industry, research and the public sector. Here is the homepage of smart(er) Salzburg: http://www.smarter-salzburg.at/.
There is a strong cluster of companies in the region, we had many of them as contributors. For instance Salzburg AG, IBM, Audio Mobil, Skidata or Hale electronic. Additionally, the County of Salzburg and obviously we as Salzburg Research are committed to a smarter Salzburg as well.
May 15th, 2011
Pavitter Josan and Gökhan Özdemir, both of HTL Salzburg Itzling, are working on a prototype solution for future interactive shop window advertising. Salzburg Research, Salzburg AG and FH Salzburg MMT are supporting the project.
Technically, this is realised with a time of flight camera which recognises movements of people (standing in front of a shopping window) and interpreting them intelligently.
Info in German on the project: see HTL project page
January 19th, 2011
Together with Markus Lassnig (head of e-motion competence centre for ICT in the tourism- and leisure-industries) we edited an HMD special issue on eTourism.
„Experience Economy“ is a term to describe a phenomenon in our society, which describes that the experience itself is being made a product. Tourism is one of the branches that takes the role of the dream factory. And because tourism is information intensive it makes heavy use of information and communication technologies.
This special issue has two types of contributions
- on the one hand, we have socio-economic papers that explain the cultural and societal backgrounds and provide facts and figures;
- on the other hand, we have technical contributions which are showcases of knowledge-based systems that explain the state-of-the-art of advanced IS systems.
See http://hmd.dpunkt.de/270/ for further details.
December 21st, 2009
This summer we are hosting a total of 9 students doing internships. The programme is supported by the ministries bmvit and bmukk and is called “generation innovation“.
The themes the students covered includes
- Usability
- Tag Clouds
- Flash Overlays
- geotaging on the iPhone
- Open Street Map Clients
- Rich-Client-Applications
We got some very good feedback by the students. Firstly, the got a completely different view of research and IT; they were exposed to a way of working with a high degree of self-responsibility (which was appreciated very much); and finally, they had fun.
Personally, I believe that the way of opening up research labs to young people means that they get to know what research in practise is; and the researchers themselves are confronted with new (and fresh) ideas and this is of benefit to both sides.
There is a German video available at Salzburg.com.
August 5th, 2009
Today, in a big event at the University of Linz, 326 people celebrated the fact, that 40 years ago at the University of Linz the first study course in “Informatik” (computer science) was introduced.
Johann Eder from the Alpe Adria University in Klagenfurt presented one of two keynote talks. The theme was on the “Great Challenges of computer science”. He selected some studies, e.g. the U.K. study, the ISTAG-Challenges (a nice PPT can be found here) and others. He reflected these with Austrian’s strengths (see Austria’s ICT-strategy).
The open keynote was by Prof. Christiane Floyd.
April 24th, 2009
The 2nd edition of Oldenbourg’s 
has been published (it is German only).
Good overview, very much from an information systems’ perspective (and not so much from a computer science point of view. Anyway, well done …
February 23rd, 2009
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