ETP4HPC webinar: GAIA-X - vision, implementation and the importance of HPC

11:00 am to noon CET

Gaia-X is a project initiated by Europe for Europe and beyond. Representatives from business, politics, and science from Europe and around the globe are working together, hand in hand, to create a federated and secure data infrastructure. Companies and citizens will collate and share data – in such a way that they keep control over them. They should decide what happens to their data, where it is stored, and always retain data sovereignty.

Pierre Gronlier, CTO of Gaia-X will present how the project is organised and how its vision will be implemented. A particular focus will be on the role of HPC in Gaia-X: how can HPC providers, computing centres, users and academic research teams contribute to it and benefit from it? 

Carlo Cavazzoni, member of the ETP4HPC Steering Board will share his insight on Gaia-X from an HPC point of view.

Jean-Philippe Nominé and Sai Narasimhamurthy will guide through the open discussion with the webinar participants.

Agenda

11:00 - Introduction and housekeeping information
11:10 - Introduction to Gaia-X by Pierre Gronlier
11:30 - How HPC and Cloud are coming together, by Carlo Cavazzoni
11:40 - Dialogue with webinar participants (moderated by Jean-Philippe Nominé and Sai Narasimhamurthy)
12:00 - End of webinar

Speakers and moderators

Pierre Gronlier

CTO, Gaia-X Association AISBL

Pierre Gronlier has been working in the IT industry for the last twelve years, with a particular focus on operationalising and scaling systems in the field of real-time communication and cloud services. With a penchant for science and an academic background in embedded real-time systems and applied mathematics in signal processing and machine learning, he started as a research engineer in video compression before joining Skype and Microsoft in Estonia. He then moved to OVHcloud in France as a Cloud Solution Architect.

Carlo Cavazzoni

SVP of Cloud Computing and Director of HPC Lab at Leonardo

Before joining Leonardo in May 2020, I’ve spent more than 20 years in Cineca (Italian supercomputing centre) dealing mainly with support of user communities and EU initiatives. From an education stand point I hold a PhD in physics from SISSA/ISAS international schools, I’m presently a member of the ETP4HPC steering board, and Leonardo representative in GAIA-X and in the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud.

Sai Narasimhamurthy

Sai Narasimhamurthy PhD is currently Managing Principal Engineer, Seagate (formerly Lead Researcher, Emerging Tech, Xyratex) working on Research and Development for next generation storage systems and responsible for EU R&D for the Seagate Systems business. Sai currently also holds the position of vice-chair of industry for the ETP4HPC organisation and leads the storage and I/O working group for developing ETP4HPC’s Strategic Research Agenda (SRA). He has also actively led and contributed to many European led HPC and Cloud research initiatives currently coordinating and providing technical leadership for SAGE and Sage2 consortia. Previously, Sai was CTO and Co-founder at 4Blox, inc, a venture capital backed storage infrastructure software company in California addressing IP SAN(Storage Area Network) performance issues.

Jean-Philippe Nominé

Dr Jean-Philippe Nominé has been with CEA  HPC division since 1992, now in charge of HPC strategic collaborations (EU and international). He is a member of ETP4HPC Steering Board, ETP4HPC Vice-chair for Research, and a member of EuroHPC Research and Innovation Advisory Group (RIAG) on behalf of ETP4HPC . He contributed to various activities of ETP4HPC since 2012, incuding impact assessment of H2020 HPC programmes between 2014 and 2018, reflections on Education and Training, and continuous membership development. J.P. Nominé graduated from Ecole Polytechnique (engineer degree) and holds a PhD from Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie (Paris) in Robotics.