>>We're back at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, winding down day four of this conference. I'm Paul Gillan, my co-host Dave Nicholson. We are talking, we've been talking super computing all week and you hear a lot about what's going on in the United States, what's going on in China, Japan. What we haven't talked a lot about is what's going on in Europe and did you know that two of the top five supercomputers in the world are actually from European countries? Well, our guest has a lot to do with that. Florian, bearish, I hope I pronounce that correctly. My German is, German is not. My strength is the operations director for price, ais, S B L. And let's start with that. What is price? >>So, hello and thank you for the invitation. I'm Flon and Price is a partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. It's a non-profit association with the seat in Brussels in Belgium. And we have 24 members. These are representatives from different European countries dealing with high performance computing in at their place. And we, so far, we provided the resources for our European research communities. But this changed in the last year, this oral HPC joint undertaking who put a lot of funding in high performance computing and co-funded five PET scale and three preis scale systems. And two of the preis scale systems. You mentioned already, this is Lumi and Finland and Leonardo in Bologna in Italy were in the place for and three and four at the top 500 at least. >>So why is it important that Europe be in the top list of supercomputer makers? >>I think Europe needs to keep pace with the rest of the world. And simulation science is a key technology for the society. And we saw this very recently with a pandemic, with a covid. We were able to help the research communities to find very quickly vaccines and to understand how the virus spread around the world. And all this knowledge is important to serve the society. Or another example is climate change. Yeah. With these new systems, we will be able to predict more precise the changes in the future. So the more compute power you have, the better the smaller the grid and there is resolution you can choose and the lower the error will be for the future. So these are, I think with these systems, the big or challenges we face can be addressed. This is the climate change, energy, food supply, security. >>Who are your members? Do they come from businesses? Do they come from research, from government? All of the >>Above. Yeah. Our, our members are public organization, universities, research centers, compute sites as a data centers, but But public institutions. Yeah. And we provide this services for free via peer review process with excellence as the most important criteria to the research community for free. >>So 40 years ago when, when the idea of an eu, and maybe I'm getting the dates a little bit wrong, when it was just an idea and the idea of a common currency. Yes. Reducing friction between, between borders to create a trading zone. Yes. There was a lot of focus there. Fast forward to today, would you say that these efforts in supercomputing, would they be possible if there were not an EU super structure? >>No, I would say this would not be possible in this extent. I think when though, but though European initiatives are, are needed and the European Commission is supporting these initiatives very well. And before praise, for instance 2008, there were research centers and data centers operating high performance computing systems, but they were not talking to each other. So it was isolated praise created community of operation sites and it facilitated the exchange between them and also enabled to align investments and to, to get the most out of the available funding. And also at this time, and still today for one single country in Europe, it's very hard to provide all the different architectures needed for all the different kind of research communities and applications. If you want to, to offer always the latest technologies, though this is really hardly possible. So with this joint action and opening the resources for other research groups from other countries, you, we, we were able to, yeah, get access to the latest technology for different communities at any given time though. And >>So, so the fact that the two systems that you mentioned are physically located in Finland and in Italy, if you were to walk into one of those facilities and meet the people that are there, they're not just fins in Finland and Italians in Italy. Yeah. This is, this is very much a European effort. So this, this is true. So, so in this, in that sense, the geography is sort of abstracted. Yeah. And the issues of sovereignty that make might take place in in the private sector don't exist or are there, are there issues with, can any, what are the requirements for a researcher to have access to a system in Finland versus a system in Italy? If you've got a EU passport, Hmm. Are you good to go? >>I think you are good to go though. But EU passport, it's now it becomes complicated and political. It's, it's very much, if we talk about the recent systems, well first, let me start a praise. Praise was inclusive and there was no any constraints as even we had users from US, Australia, we wanted just to support excellence in science. And we did not look at the nationality of the organization, of the PI and and so on. There were quotas, but these quotas were very generously interpreted. So, and if so, now with our HPC joint undertaking, it's a question from what European funds, these systems were procured and if a country or being country are associated to this funding, the researchers also have access to these systems. And this addresses basically UK and and Switzerland, which are not in the European Union, but they were as created to the Horizon 2020 research framework. And though they could can access the systems now available, Lumi and Leono and the Petascale system as well. How this will develop in the future, I don't know. It depends to which research framework they will be associated or not. >>What are the outputs of your work at price? Are they reference designs? Is it actual semiconductor hardware? Is it the research? What do you produce? >>So the, the application we run or the simulation we run cover all different scientific domains. So it's, it's science, it's, but also we have industrial let projects with more application oriented targets. Aerodynamics for instance, for cars or planes or something like this. But also fundamental science like the physical elementary physics particles for instance or climate change, biology, drug design, protein costa, all these >>Things. Can businesses be involved in what you do? Can they purchase your, your research? Do they contribute to their, I'm sure, I'm sure there are many technology firms in Europe that would like to be involved. >>So this involving industry though our calls are open and is, if they want to do open r and d, they are invited to submit also proposals. They will be evaluated and if this is qualifying, they will get the access and they can do their jobs and simulations. It's a little bit more tricky if it's in production, if they use these resources for their business and do not publish the results. They are some, well, probably more sites who, who are able to deal with these requests. Some are more dominant than others, but this is on a smaller scale, definitely. Yeah. >>What does the future hold? Are you planning to, are there other countries who will be joining the effort, other institutions? Do you plan to expand your, your scope >>Well, or I think or HPC joint undertaking with 36 member states is quite, covers already even more than Europe. And yeah, clearly if, if there are other states interest interested to join that there is no limitation. Although the focus lies on European area and on union. >>When, when you interact with colleagues from North America, do you, do you feel that there is a sort of European flavor to supercomputing that is different or are we so globally entwined? No. >>So research is not national, it's not European, it's international. This is also clearly very clear and I can, so we have a longstanding collaboration with our US colleagues and also with Chap and South Africa and Canada. And when Covid hit the world, we were able within two weeks to establish regular seminars inviting US and European colleagues to talk to to other, to each other and exchange the results and find new collaboration and to boost the research activities. So, and I have other examples as well. So when we, we already did the joint calls US exceed and in Europe praise and it was a very interesting experience. So we received applications from different communities and we decided that we will review this on our side, on European, with European experts and US did it in US with their experts. And you can guess what the result was at the meeting when we compared our results, it was matching one by one. It was exactly the same. Recite >>That it, it's, it's refreshing to hear a story of global collaboration. Yeah. Where people are getting along and making meaningful progress. >>I have to mention you, I have to to point out, you did not mention China as a country you were collaborating with. Is that by, is that intentional? >>Well, with China, definitely we have less links and collaborations also. It's also existing. There, there was initiative to look at the development of the technologies and the group meet on a regular basis. And there, there also Chinese colleagues involved. It's on a lower level, >>Yes, but is is the con conversations are occurring. We're out of time. Florian be operations director of price, European Super Computing collaborative. Thank you so much for being with us. I'm always impressed when people come on the cube and submit to an interview in a language that is not their first language. Yeah, >>Absolutely. >>Brave to do that. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. We'll be right back after this break from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas.

>>Hi, I'm Peter Burress. And welcome to another cute conversation. This one from BMC Helix is immersion days in Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California One of the biggest challenges that every IittIe organization faces. In fact, every business is how to start merging greater control through I t sm as well as greater change and evolve ability of systems through Dev ops. It's a big topic. A lot of folks looking at how best to do it. We've got a great person here to talk to us about it. Dick Stark is the president CEO of right star Dick. Welcome to the Cube. >>Well, thanks very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity beyond the Cube here. >>Excellent. Well, why don't we start? Tell us a little about right start? >>Sure. Right. Stars in I t sm consultancy and we happen to be a dev Ops consulted to say at the same time, we're also a BMC solution provider and lasting solution provider. Now, we've been a BMC solution provider for for 16 years, so we've been in this space a long time and we've earned several accolades up along the way. We made it into the Forrester I t s m service provider. It's not called a Magic Quadrant because that's what God gardener uses. But instead it's a wave report. And so we made it sort of into the far right hand quadrant there. And if you added up all the points we ended up in North America being rated number five out of all the different idea Sam Consultancy. So it's very proud about that. And then last year with BMC, we were the North American Solution provider of the year in the D S. M space. >>Well is an export person, I can tell you Congratulations. Those waves very seriously. Let's jump into this question, though off what does I t. S m from a technology and people in process standpoint have to do to accommodate some of the changes that are being founded and defusing out of the Hole Dev Ops world, which is just having an enormous impact on our I t thinks and does >>it really has. And you know, we've been in the space a long time and I t s m Sometimes I tell the words are interchangeable and there are about if you can believe this about three million people That ended up getting an Idol certification of some short like an Idol Foundation certificate. And over time, that's been have been a really a big, big deal. However, Idol now is lost, its luster just a little bit. And it's allowed Dev ops to sort of sneak in or add dollar whatever you won't want to call it, and I'd listen. Standing still, though, they've bounced back and bounce back in a hard way. And they've they've come up with what's now called Idle for an Idol For was just released this this year, and it takes some of those Dev ops principles, and it has its own value stream as well and is a result Idle for or agile idol or whatever you wanna call it now is taking a little bit stronger position. And when I say Dev ops principles, it's things like Collaborate. It's things like promote, it's It's things like operate and automate. It's It's It's all about it again. It's all about collaboration in some of these other values that that you'll see in Dev ops. I guess what what happened is we spent a lot of time on the Idol side of things, and we did things for process sake and a good example would be changed management and spent a lot of time putting together is change management processes per this idol framework. Okay, And what what happened is that a lot of the users then rebelled a little bit because it might take longer to go through and fill out all the paperwork of It's not paperwork the online tool set then to do a change than to actually perform the change itself. So I don't got a little bit of a bad rap. And so that's where this whole Dev ops thing has come in. And the whole idea right now is to get Dev and Ops under the Shame umbrella, because that's not typically very used to do. But it's, but it's certainly happening. >>Well, let's talk about why that intersections happening, right? So I'm gonna I'm gonna show a little bit of history from my perspective as well, you know, I told began, First of all, it started in some government agencies many years ago, but it started as the basis of it was How do we take better care of the assets with an I T. Which at the time were mainly hardware. In many respects, what we've seen happen over the last 25 30 years that Idol has been an extent. Is that the nature of the assets that I t recognizes? His acknowledges delivering value for the business has changed. We've gone from hardware to infrastructure is code. That's where Dev Ops is so many respects. What you're saying is that Iittle is now trying to bring the best of what it means to do a good job of asset management with a new class of assets. Namely, software is code infrastructures code, and that's where we have to have that marriage. I got that right. >>That's that's correct. And you don't want to have silent silos. You want to be a silo buster if if anything else. And I just wanted to mention something else that I think is kind of fun along with this Idol. Four. We now do what's called the Mars Lander simulation traded it replaced. If you've heard of the Apollo 13 simulation, will Mars four, even though it's idle for specific, it's really all about Dev ops, and I took the Mars board just about a month or so ago, and it's a lot of fun. You sit down and the whole objective is to get get to Mars and you're a business. So and you're going to be selling the data that you're going to collect along along the way. And so the whole idea is to is to make a profit, and you have all these different roles that you play. When I went through it, I was the release manager then. But you might have a business analyst. You might have a service desk person. You have vendors and a it's it's really it's very realistic that and typically like a lot of large enterprises, you start playing the game and it's just chaos, and you have to go back and try this over and over again until essentially you get it right. And I was surprised how easy it is to get sucked in. If you're in a big enterprise, your silent, you have a specific role that you have to d'oh and you have instructions how you're supposed to do that and you want to stick to it. Whatever you know, whatever your assignment is, you have to do that. But that's not the right thing to Dio. Remember, it's about collaboration. It's about transparency. It's been it's about posting your goals, posting the results and moving forward from from there. And so I was surprised how I got sucked into it. And so I can understand why we need to make some progress in this space. And it's all about getting people to change their behavior a little bit in some of these new tool set certainly help >>well, as well. You're going back to what you said. He used to be the three R's of any regime or rolls responsibilities and relationships, and so the roles have are evolving. But often it's just in name only the responsibilities. You know today it's still code. It still has to run on hard, where it's not a bunch of hamsters, they're doing things. But as you said, it's really the relationships amongst the various actors as we introduce more business people. As technology gets put into position to generate more revenue or to do more with customer experience, the relationships are being pressured, are being really pushed to evolve. So how do you see in your practice in right stars practice. How do you see the relationships between Dev ops and I T s M and the business starting to evolve so that you can have amore coherent, comprehensive view of how you make sister? Well, >>I think in that particular case, it's gonna take some time. I mean, it's not gonna happen overnight. I mean, that's why you have agile coaches, or that's while you have the scales agile, or the safe framework is because people don't get it. And they need to understand how to work together better with others. And so it's not gonna happen by just implementing a new new tool set turning the key and then say, OK, everything's gonna be fine. It's good to get the integration between the different tool sets. And the technology is certainly there to do that. But without having some instruction to begin with and having the door in users cooperate. You're not going to see that kind of kind of performance improvement or cost statements or whatever it is that you're looking for. You're not going to see that >>they're one of the biggest challenges in any changes. Abandonment. The user's ultimately abandoned. So as you look a tte. The ideas M tool set that you're utilizing mainly from being right is it is that there's a degree of there's always a degree of pedagogic tool away, it says. Here's how you should do things. What you're discovering is that tool set is really catalyzing. Helping to catalyze positive changes in your mind within a lot of your customer base is, well, the >>thing about Helix, and I'm very excited about this because we're making a lot of good progress with. He likes our customer base that we have right now and give you a good example. George Washing University were based in a D C. Area day. If they are, too, they've been a long time remedy customer. We've moved them to Helix, and then, just recently, when I say recently started a year ago in August, they moved to the BMC Chap Cat box platform. Then, this past August, they totally went cold turkey with chatbots throughout the entire university. That makes a tremendous difference in the performance and not just performance, but also on the cost and the efficiency that the university, particularly from a service management perspective, is providing to its university employees and to its students, just like you mentioned today in the keynote session that it's all about mobility. And practically practically all the students there rely on their their cellphone day in and day out. And so when they have a question at G W. If it's how do I get a new account? How do I get a park parking permit? G on the wireless in my dorm room isn't working. You don't pick up the phone and call. Nobody does that you texted at. And this is a chap off its power by IBM Watson, and it works great. And there's lots of good things that are gonna come out of that. For example, students, I think they probably still have to turn paper sent. You know, maybe that's all Elektronik Lee delivered, but I think you might still have to print out a paper and turn it into your professor. You know, I'm not sure, but bluebirds Anyway, you're probably you're probably gonna do this late at night when the service desk is an open. So what do you do if you can't get the printer to work? Well, you pick up your cell phone, you text in that That the issue and bingo. You've got a response. So those are the sorts of things that are gonna make for a tremendous amount of impact, and it's gonna cause people to change their behavior in really a good way. Another good example. We have another longtime hospital customer. They have a 24 by seven service desk. They're huge, and they pay a lot of money to operate that 24 by seven. But they hardly get any call said at night. Right? Because not that many people work. So why don't they just turn that and you start using chatbots and think of that the r A. Y. It's just incredible. And I think you're going to see more. And that more situations like that as we move forward. >>Dick start President CEO of right Starr. Yep. Thanks very much for being too. >>Thanks very much. Appreciate it. Okay. >>And what's going on? Peter Burress. You've been watching other cube conversation from BMC Helix immersion days in Santa Clara. Thanks very much. Next time