Potsdam. A computer research lab of international significance opened its doors at Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) on Wednesday, June 16: the “HPI Future SOC Lab”, a top-level computer science research lab equipped with the latest high-performance computers, was opened for scientific research. Prof. Hasso Plattner, the institute’s founder and the co-founder and supervisory board chairman of the SAP software group, came to Potsdam for the opening ceremony. Among the guests were leading computer scientists and top managers from Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Israel and the U.S.
The opening ceremony for the research lab was integrated into the 5th international symposium on “Future Trends in Service-Oriented Computing”, held by the HPI Research School, the institute’s graduate school. Among the symposium participants were junior researchers from the Research School’s branches at Technion (Haifa, Israel) and the University of Cape Town (South Africa).
The HPI’s research lab is equipped with the latest hardware and software by a top-level consortium of IT companies, such as Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, SAP and EMC. Both hardware and software come fresh off the R&D departments and are not yet available in the market. For example, there are high-performance servers with up to 128 logical cores (each comparable to a conventional CPU) and up to two terabytes of RAM, corresponding to 500 commercially available PCs.
The HPI’s top-level research lab was launched in a period of revolutionary changes in computer architecture: multi-core processors, increasing amounts of RAM, new ways of processing enormous amounts of data in very short time – if future computer architectures synergize perfectly with massively parallel software, large companies and institutions will be able to accelerate most IT processing stages on a big scale (by a factor of up to 100). Virtualization and cloud computing are also making important contributions to this end.
These developments are to be investigated in the new international “Future SOC Lab” – by both HPI researchers and special guest researchers from around the world. On application, they can use the lab for real-world research on new concepts relevant to future service-oriented computing (SOC). An important aspect is the assumption of a situation whereby software applications are no longer being run at an in-house data center or by end users, but by external service providers.
Note to editors:
Background texts and photos related to our new top-level research lab are available here.
Further information:
Download this press release (.pdf).
