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Friday, June 26, 2009 11:00 am - 12:30 pm Hall B2.1 & B2.2 |
For a detailed schedule of this session, please click here. |
The last technical session of ISC’09 is somehow different from the other conference sessions, as it does not deal exclusively with HPC topics such as technologies, architectures and applications. This session tries to bring together high-energy physics and supercomputing on the one hand, and on the other hand it will focus on human-like robots for “intelligent” solutions of problems in complex environments.
The first talk in this session is about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva/Switzerland. This circular particle accelerator for hadrons first started on September 10, 2008, and is the most powerful accelerator in the world. Its direct costs amounted to over three billion Euros, and its main purpose is to verify the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson, the last unobserved particle of the standard model in particle physics. In 2008, LHC was in the news several times, especially for its failure on September 19, which will keep the system down at least until September 2009. In his presentation, Dr. Ian Bird of CERN will focus on the question: “The LHC Grid Service as a Virtual Supercomputer?” Simulating collisions between hadrons and the interaction between new particles and detectors generates massive amounts of data and requires huge amounts of computing power. Hundreds of clusters have been connected to form a worldwide grid – the LHC Computing Grid – to handle the vast amount of data produced by LHC. Dr. Bird is LHC Computing Grid Project Leader at CERN and exactly the right expert for this talk.
To broaden our horizon, we will leave the world of supercomputing in the second part of this session and have a look at what is going on in the world of robots. We have managed to win Prof. Dr. Edgar Körner to give a talk on “The Brain-like Vision”. Prof. Körner is President of the Honda Research Institute Europe and Director of the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is a world-renowned expert and our keynote speaker for Friday. In his talk, Prof. Körner will discuss the latest developments in human-like robots and their advantages for society. Prof. Körner and his team developed the most advanced humanoid robot in the world: ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative MObility), which he will talk about in his presentation, too. We are looking forward to Prof. Körner’s talk!