Big Data & Cloud Computing: hand in hand

09 June 2015

Since the inception of the information age, the flow of global communications and networking has increased exponentially. As a result, we now have access to more data than was ever thought possible. 

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This massive growth in the scope of data generated worldwide has become a challenge that requires large-scale computational infrastructures to ensure that data is not only adequately processed, but also analyzed, in order to extract the maximum possible value from it. What is now commonly known as 'Big Data' is knowledge waiting to be unraveled, and subsequently exploited: commercially, educationally, socially, politically… the list of possible applications is as endless as the human imagination is able to make it.

Born of the equally increasing need for a powerful technology to perform massive-scale and complex computation, 'Cloud Computing' appears as the most viable means to deliver on the promise of Big Data. Both technologies continue to evolve, and are bound to do so hand in hand. From the design and operation of the data centers that are expected to host, process and deliver meaningful analytics on the data, to the interconnection networks that bind them together, solutions are needed, and changes are afoot.

On June 11^th, the Madrid research institute IMDEA Networks organizes a one-day event under the heading '7^th Annual IMDEA Networks Workshop: Big Data and Cloud Computing', to explore the state of the art on both of these key research areas. The scientific challenges are many and span different aspects of data management, from scalability, to availability, integrity, quality, privacy or legal and regulatory issues. This event will bring together international experts, from academia (University of Cambridge, Politecnico di Torino, Columbia University, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, KTH – Royal Institute of Technology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, The University of Texas at Austin, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Technical University of Madrid – UPM), industry (Amadeus, Kumori Systems & ITI, Interdigital and Bitergia) as well as research organizations (the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, SICS Swedish ICT and Telefonica R&D).

The workshop features talks by Rosa Badia of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, looking into programming approaches to the cloud; Seif Haridi, affiliated to KTH/SICS in Sweden, who will provide an introduction to the Flink Streaming programming model; José Manuel Bernabeu-Aubán from Kumori Systems & ITI, who will explain his views on the development of cloud infrastructures with the optimization of operational costs and elasticity as driving requirements; Israel Herraiz of the Amadeus IT Group, presenting the industry view on the prospects of Big Data as applied to the travel industry; Marco Mellia, based at Politecnico di Torino, who explores the potential of the web as a source of data; and Esteban Moro, from University Carlos III of Madrid, who will present his recent study on the impact of unemployment in the use of social networks in Spain. Antonio Fernández Anta, a Research Professor at IMDEA Networks is the Scientific Coordinator of this Workshop, and the leader of the Global Computing Group research group at the Institute.