Speaker
Dr
Kurt Stockinger
(Credit Suisse)
Description
The concept of the parallel universe is known both in philosophy and physics and is sometimes used to describe concurrent physical phenomena that occur in isolation without communication. In this talk we investigate the concept from a completely different angle. We introduce the parallel universe effect of two data-intensive disciplines, namely physics and banking.
At the first glance this comparison might seem absurd. Apart from the fact that both high-energy physics (in particular high-energy physics at CERN) and banking are major players in beautiful regions in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, the differences between these two fields seem to be significantly larger than their similarities. So why should we be interested in entangling these universes?
Common to both communities is that they face the challenge of large-scale data exploration. However, the approaches of these parallel universes could not be more different. While the banking industry has the credo “buy commodity solutions and build only if necessary”, the physics community has often exactly the opposite stance, namely “build tailor-made systems that scale far beyond currently available enterprise solutions”. One example is the distributed data store called “ROOT” which originated at CERN and is now developed at high-energy physics labs across the globe ranging from Japan to California. This data store currently holds several Petabytes of data and is one of the largest data stores in the world. However, due to the parallel universe effect, that system is hardly known to the data-intensive banking community in particular and the enterprise computing community in general. Banking is so much more familiar with Oracle, IBM-DB2 or SQL Server – to name only a few – rather than with extreme-scale systems being built in the physics community.
In this talk we shine a light on these parallel universes and explain their fundamental building blocks. The idea is not necessarily to merge these data-intensive communities but to engage them in a discussion where both sides could harvest fruits from each other and thus bring them to a higher orbital state.
Author
Dr
Kurt Stockinger
(Credit Suisse)