Issue 141 April/May 2015 CONTENTS
Laboratory Informatics Software for satisfying rigorous regulations
Sophia Ktori investigates how electronic informatics systems are satisfying regulatory requirements
Conference report Paperless Lab Academy
Tom Wilkie reports on outsourcing and disruptive technologies in laboratory informatics Profile Lonza
Sophia Ktori looks at how Lonza Bioscience’s MODA system offers not just a paperless but mobile way to carry out microbiology testing in laboratory informatics
Profile Autoscribe
Sophia Ktori discovers Autoscribe’s LIMS has more than the usual applications to offer in laboratory informatics
The difference between a LIMS and a LIS? Gloria Metrick highlights a significant trend in informatics soſtware
High-Performance Computing Future processing technologies
Robert Roe looks at alternatives to the x86, including server on a chip and OpenPower Why scientists should care about storage
Tom Wilkie reports on the innovative technologies being developed, as data storage has become as important to scientists as compute power
Grappling with the growth of scientific data
Metadata is key to mastering the volumes of data, argues Bob Murphy Taking action on big data
Stan Ahalt discusses the US National Consortium for Data Science Building the next-generation US supercomputer
Robert Roe looks at the two consortia capable of getting to exascale Applications
Simulation and safety
Integrated simulation soſtware is the only way to cope with fragmented automobile safety standards. Robert Roe reports
Resources Suppliers' directory
Gender equality in the HPC industry Alison Kennedy discusses the challenge of XXscale in the HPC industry
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Simplicity is key to a bright future
Standards and simplicity are the themes running through this issue of Scientific Computing World. In the world of laboratory informatics, standard data formats will simplify the business of getting different laboratories to talk to each other. Tis topic dominated the Paperless Lab Academy in Barcelona, as the report on page 10 notes, and, while Sophia Ktori concentrates on the convergence of regulations across the pharmaceutical, food and drink, and other regulated industries, standardised data feature large in her article also. In the world of high-performance computing,
everyone appears to agree that simplifying the business of storing data is the key to ensuring that scientists can concentrate on their science, as the feature explores on page 22. It is striking that data storage companies such as Seagate and DDN are showing so much interest in the Large Hadron Collider, because they believe that the lessons learned there can be applied much more widely, in the world of commercial Big Data as well as in science and engineering. In aerospace, Robert Roe discovers that
soſtware vendors are working hard to simplify the lot of the design engineers – again so that they can concentrate on their engineering and do not have to become computer scientists (page 32). However, Robert Roe sounds a discordant
note in the second of his series of articles on new processor technologies on page 17. He sets out the many paths that could lead to exascale, including the IBM OpenPower initiative as well as technologies deriving from the embedded and telecoms sectors such as ARM and DSP processors. In high-performance computing, as in Revolutionary China under Chairman Mao, the idea is to let a hundred flowers bloom.
Tom Wilkie Editor-in-chief
Cover: Claudia Marcelloni; Maximilien Brice/CERN
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