ISC to stream live from Hamburg

The International Supercomputing Conference announced [PDF] a welcome piece of news yesterday: they’ll be streaming at least some of this year’s program live on the interwebs

ISC'09 logoIf you can’t make it to Hamburg for ISC’10, the 25th International Supercomputing Conference, you can still catch some of the program highlights via live streaming over the web.

In addition, ISC’10 will be producing a daily video blog highlighting the newest, coolest and most informative discoveries and developments of each day and posting them on the ISC’10 website. ISC’10 will be held May 30 – June 3 in the Congress Center Hamburg.

Outstanding; I know that from the conference committee perspective this is probably an emotionally difficulty decision. If they stream content, why would anyone bother to go? But as anyone who has been to a conference knows, most of the value is in the personal interactions and accidental conversations with friends and colleagues. If someone isn’t at particular event in a particular year, it’s probably because they weren’t ever going anyway (kids, job, budget, unsure of the value, whatever). Streaming the content keeps the information from being entombed in a space and time locality where it will only impact a few thousand people — a great service to the community, and good advertising. Eventually someone who wasn’t planning to go will see the streaming content, find some real value, and go next year.

So, pay ISC back for their effort with some of your attention, and try to catch at least some of the webcasts. Why not the first one?

The first live session will be the ISC’10 Opening Session beginning at 11:25 a.m. Monday, May 31 (CET). The session will include Highlights of the 35th TOP500 List (11:25-11:50 a.m.) and the Opening Keynote Address on “HPC Technology: Scale-Up & Scale-Out” by Kirk B. Skaugen, the Vice President of Intel Architecture Group and General Manager of the Data Center Group, Intel.

Go ahead and bookmark the streaming link.