Since EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum in 2010, they’ve become a regular at EMC World. This year the firm is holding the second annual Data Science Summit, one of several community events going within  the conference.  Things kick off today and will continue through tomorrow.

The Summit will feature keynotes from experts within this industry over the course of the next two days, spotlighting executive speakers and data scientists. Among them will be Intuit’s big data VP Nora Denzel, Seed founding CEO Adamn Bly, statistician Nate Silver and Nathan Wolfe, the founder of Viral Forecasting and a visiting professor at Stanford.

These experts will cover the nuts and bolts of big data, including the most prominent trends in this industry, the underlining value proposition and and ideas on what we can expect in the future.

All this will loop back to ways in which big science pertains to EMC, and Greenplum is one of the central foundations supporting the storage giant’s big data strategy.

Earlier today the company announced the Greenplum Analytics Workbench, a 1,000-node scale out development environment for data scientists. The solution is the result of collaboration with the Apache Foundation, and is meant to serve organizations as a lab and testing grounds for innovations that tie in with big data.

Workbench is very much academia oriented; it’s designed to empower researchers, and will be integrated into Greenplum’s Hadoop training program from the get go.

“The 1,000-node cluster will also be made available to members of Greenplum’s training and certification classes for Hadoop. With the first publicly available courses launching this summer, Greenplum will offer a set of comprehensive Hadoop training programs designed to provide participants with the knowledge and programming skills required to leverage Hadoop.”

Stay tuned for more updates from EMC World 2012 as they happen.