Issue 144 October/November 2015 CONTENTS
Laboratory informatics The cutting Edge
In her profile of Te Edge, Sophia Ktori discusses how the company is expanding its portfolio to address the challenges of data analytics as well as data management
Managing resources in the cloud
Sophia Ktori continues her series profiling informatics companies by looking at how GoInformatics offers soſtware as a service over the cloud
Is the informatics sector ready for QbD?
Sophia Ktori looks at how process analytic technologies can make quality by design a reality High-performance computing
Skies not yet clear for scientific cloud computing 12
Big data and cloud computing are thriving in commerce and business, but scientific and engineering applications appear to be lagging behind, Tom Wilkie discovers
Transforming discovery through integrated, comprehensive data management 18 Dan Bedard describes the progress that the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System is making in removing the data management roadblocks that inhibit the wider research use of data
Who will write next-generation software?
Robert Roe finds that soſtware scalability and portability may be more important even than energy efficiency to the future of HPC
SC15: HPC transforms
A look ahead to SC15, which returns to the ‘live music capital of the world’, Austin, Texas Applications
The social engineering network
Company profile: Gemma Church talks to engineering soſtware house Esteco about simulations and creating a social network for engineers
Cloud collaboration
At the European Altair Technology conference, Robert Roe heard that new tools are driving innovation within modelling and simulation
Optimisation: Re-invigorating smoke stack industries
Robert Roe investigates the use of optimisation soſtware in modelling and simulation and its power to re-invigorate traditional manufacturing methods
Resources Suppliers' directory
EDITORIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE TEAM Editor-in-chief Dr Tom Wilkie
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Specialist reporters Robert Roe, Sophia Ktori, Gloria Metrick, Gemma Church Circulation/readership enquiries Jesse Lund
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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015 3 38 34 30 26 22 10 6 4
HPC on the point of transformation
In recent years, some residents of Austin, Texas, have adopted as the unofficial slogan for their city ‘Keep Austin Weird’, so they may feel that it is very much in keeping with that view of the city for SC15, the US supercomputing conference and exhibition, to arrive in the city in November! We present a selection of the hardware, soſtware, and services that will be on display in the SC15 exhibition on page 26. Aſter many years of comparative stability based
on commodity x86 hardware, high-performance computing is itself entering a new stage with all sorts of wonderful if not necessarily weird possibilities opening up. But as Robert Roe outlines in his feature on page 22, new technical developments bring new challenges with them. In particular, programmability could be a more critical issue even than energy efficiency of future machines. HPC is making inroads into more conventional
computer-aided engineering, as Robert heard from the chief executive of Altair (page 34). Engineering firms may also take advantage of ‘cloud-bursting’ to run the occasional very large job by renting capacity on the cloud rather than having to invest in hardware themselves that they might only rarely use. Yet, somehow, the cloud does not seem to be
making the inroads one might expect in science and engineering, compared to business and enterprise computing. As Tom Wilkie discusses on page 12, there are difficult issues inhibiting more use of the cloud. As is the case for programmability, many of these are not purely technological, but arise from corporate managerial concerns about data security. Interestingly, cloud-based solutions seem to
be making headway in areas of computing for science and engineering other than HPC. On page 6, Sophia Ktori profiles one company offering informatics over the cloud, while on page 10 she discusses the move towards process-analytic testing and quality by design that could transform the role of the traditional QA/QC laboratory. It appears to be an open question, at present, whether the informatics vendors have recognised that this is one of those issues which could turn out to be a threat, but which, if addressed in time, could be a great
opportunity. Tom Wilkie Editor-in-chief
Cover: Welcomia/
Shutterstock.com
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