Re-Thinking Information Technologies and Services at National Laboratories

Charlie Catlett, CIO, Argonne National Laboratory and
Senior Fellow, Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and
Argonne National Laboratory

Abstract:

Information service and technology providers and consumers, especially in
the sciences and in high-performance computing, are accustomed to the
continual and rapid change brought about by Moore's Law. Even within this
context new concepts or technologies periodically emerge to catalyze
significant, disruptive change.

Commodity microprocessors drove vector supercomputers to extinction in the
early 1990s, the World Wide Web created unprecedented access to information
as well as an entirely new commercial domain. Today the ubiquity of
Internet access on powerful mobile devices is driving changes in the way
that humans are interacting with one another and with information.

The rate of adoption of social media and social networking tools in the past
five years exceeds the rate seen by any previous technology. Concurrently,
computing and web standards, virtualization technologies, and
high-performance Internet access have enabled new approaches to the delivery
of software and to the provision of infrastructure. Provision of software
and/or infrastructure as services - "cloud computing" - has expanded the
options available for delivering information services within institutions.

Catlett will discuss why and how social media and commercial cloud services
represent opportunities to transform National Laboratories.