That being said, let me qualify my statements above. What I don’t want to see happen is a flood of “me-too” vendor organizations claiming incredible application speedups out-of-the-box with Tesla [et.al.]. I feel this could quite possibly have a dulling effect on NVIDIA’s technology. Mass marketing of a product is a good thing. It drives a great competitive atmosphere between vendors. However, the differentiation I yearn for is a qualification by the vendors that Tesla/CUDA is not simply a silver bullet, but a great tool on the road to better computational platform.

I apologize for sounding a bit ‘half-empty’. I simply want everyone [vendors and users alike] to fully understand the implications of a Tesla-driven compute platform.

“Everyone has an NVIDIA desktop supercomputer product. Show me something differentiated.”

is a bit flippant. You’re not seeing the forest from the trees. As an industry we’re seeing a change. More than just a few companies are offering hardware with massive amount of computational power that can be on the user’s desktop. The fact that we’re seeing more than one company doing this, at least to me, indicates that the market is large enough to warrant the development and sale of such machines. To me this is a sea change of potentially huge proportions.

It’s easy to find a company offering a one-off, the market is full of them. But finding several companies that see a large enough market to warrant the development of a desktop system despite the fact that other companies may be doing the same thing, is something I think is remarkable.

So I think you are missing the point by just looking for differentiation between vendors. I understand the quest for differentiation but as I first said, I think you are missing the forest from trees.

An equal example are clusters. Cluster vendors all use the same CPUs, chipsets, memory, networking, etc. While people are looking for differentiation between vendors (“Why IBM as opposed to HP?”) I think we should also be saying, “Wow, all these vendors are doing similar things so there may be something here.” It’s kind of a glass half-full vs. a glass half-empty analogy.

As to the conference, I’d say it was a great success. My only disappointment was that even though, as you say, there were a lot of visualization products on the floor, there weren’t any remote visualization products unless I completely missed them (Mind you, as big as the floor was, thats a distinct possibility)

But the big presence of nVidia gear is a herald of yet another shift in the HPC business. We went from big iron, to many commodity boxes, now shifting toward many GPUs. Fun stuff and the industry is healthy despite the hard economic times.

Anyway, I think the sc08 committee did a wonderful job and I’m looking forward to sc09!