Plenary Speaker: Achim Streit

Achim Streit, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Enabling Data-Intensive Science in the Helmholtz Association

BIO: Prof. Dr. Achim Streit is the director of the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) and professor for computer science at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) since mid-2010. He is responsible for the HPC and Big Data activities at SCC – both systems as well as R&D activities. He is topic speaker “Data-Intensive Science and Federated Computing” in the Helmholtz Programme “Supercomputing & Big Data” (of which he is also the deputy speaker). He is the coordinator of the Large Scale Data Management and Analysis (LSDMA) initiative in Helmholtz, which is about fostering data-intensive science in Germany through Data Life Cycle Labs and generic methods research. He is the coordinator of the Helmholtz Data Federation (HDF), a 5-year multi-million Euro investment project to establish an open federated research data infrastructure in Germany. He and his institute are involved in major European e-Infrastructure projects such as EUDAT2020, EOSCpilot, INDIGO-Datacloud, AARC as well as the FET flagship Human Brain project. Prior to KIT, he was at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, where he was responsible for the Grid activities and active in several EU e-infrastructure projects such as DEISA, PRACE, OMII-Europe, EGI-InSPIRE and helped to initiate the EMI and EUDAT projects. 

ABSTRACT: The Helmholtz Association of German research centres pursues long-term research with large-scale scientific projects and research facilities ranging from life sciences, climate and environment up to matter and the universe. One of its long-term programs is dedicated to research on “Supercomputing & Big Data” (SBD) which is of major importance and provides enabling technologies to all Helmholtz research fields.
In data-intensive science collaboration is a key factor. On the national level we lead the multi-disciplinary initiative LSDMA across the Helmholtz research fields to foster the exchange of knowledge, expertise and technologies. Data experts from the program collaborate closely with domain researchers from other Helmholtz programs and German universities within so-called “Data Life Cycle Labs” (DLCL). These aim at optimizing data life cycles and developing community-specific tools and services in joint R&D with the scientific communities. In addition, new generic data methods and technologies for data life cycle management are designed and developed, large scale data facilities and federated data infrastructures are enhanced and operated, and national/international collaborations such as HDF, EUDAT, INDIGO-DataCloud, EU-T0 and WLCG are advanced.