Andrew's Corner: HPC Event Guide

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184-andrew-jonesIf you’ve followed insideHPC for any period of time, you’ll know that we love any reason to get us out of the office [in fact, our spouses usually encourage it].  You’ve also probably become accustomed to our annual Supercomputing conference.  But what else is there?  Our dear friend Andrew Jones wrote up a great overview for the greenhorn HPC techie looking for great events to attend throughout the year.  Despite all the fanfare, there are plenty of great things to do within the HPC universe outside of SC.

Whatever your scale of technical computing, from multicore workstations to multi-thousand-node supercomputers, getting involved with the active HPC community can help you with your parallel computing goals. Online resources can help, but by far the most effective way of benefiting from the wider HPC community is by participating at the right events.

The most obvious event to attend is easy: the annual Supercomputing show held in the US.  However, if you’re interested in a more personable event of similar scale, check out the International Supercomputing Conference [ISC] in Europe.  It averages about 2,000 attendees as opposed to the 10K that peruse the floor at SC.

What if you’re more interested in the purely technical side of HPC.  Case studies, networking and project collaboration are really what you’re after.  Andrew suggests you check out the bi-annual HPC User Forum and/or the Newport event.

There are plenty of other great events throughout the year as well.  Many of the various vendors have user group meetings, the IEEE and ACM both hold numerous domain-specific events and SIAM will even help you with your math homework.  At the end of the day, the name of the game is participation.  Get our of your element and participate with your peers.  HPC users include some of the most dynamic and interesting individuals in science and tech.  Use your peers to further your own pursuit of knowledge.

Many people have rightly remarked that the HPC community really is that — a community — and that there is still a relatively high degree of connection between the various practitioners. In other words, despite its growing size and global reach, it feels like a small community. People know each other.

The only other obvious reason to attend any of these shows is simply to meet Andrew himself.  He’s been known to frequent many of the aforementioned events.  In the mean time, check out his full article here.