Today Dell Technologies joins with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), industry companies, and academic partners to launch a new blockchain research lab: BlockLAB. SDSC’s BlockLAB Director and Lead Scientist Dr. Jim Short explains the need for primary research on blockchains, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts.
“One of our primary goals is to work closely with industry partners to provide foundational knowledge that helps science-based and industrial companies evaluate the potential benefits and risks of applying these new technologies to critical, large-scale transaction and data-intensive business processes.”
This is not the first time that Dell Technologies has sponsored research at SDSC. For the past four years Dell EMC has worked with Dr. Short on groundbreaking research into the topic of data valuation. The partnership resulted in the publication of the article What’s Your Data Worth in the Spring 2017 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review.
Dell EMC CTO John Roese explained the natural progression of the data valuation research to focus on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies:
“Our data valuation research showed that our customers needed to better quantify the relative value of their digital assets to focus on the most important areas driving business results. Blockchain and distributed ledgers, as a new and potentially trusted data exchange platform, show promise in better leveraging enterprise data assets in new ways. BlockLAB will serve as a hands-on lab where our customers and partners can develop strategies to explore and implement new approaches to the data monetization process.”
Steve Todd, a Dell EMC Fellow, will coordinate the research on behalf of six strategically-aligned sponsors from the Dell Technologies family of companies: Dell EMC, VMware, Virtustream, RSA, Boomi, and Pivotal. Todd highlighted that the mission of BlockLAB aligns well with the portfolio capabilities of Dell Technologies:
“The BlockLAB will focus on two areas: business use cases for ledgers and evaluation of technology stacks. VMware has built an enterprise-class blockchain stack that integrates with multiple offerings from Dell EMC, RSA, Boomi, and Virtustream. We hope to not only demonstrate interoperability with other industry stacks, but also enable developers to quickly write and deploy blockchain applications for various use cases with our Pivotal framework.”
The outcome of this research will assist BlockLAB in creating a state of the art, end-to-end solution through the deployment of the VMware blockchain stack in a hybrid cloud environment that will leverage Virtustream Enterprise Cloud.
Details of BlockLAB’s research program and events this year can be obtained online at https://www.clds.info/blocklab.html. BlockLAB’s 2018 summary of research progress will be presented at SDSC’s annual Data West technology conference December 5-6 at SDSC. More information is at www.datawest.org.
