The ISC’11 Conference wrapped up today with a closing session that featured the taping of a live TV program called Analyst Crossfire. This fast-paced panel discussion featured two HPC users and two vendors in lively discussion moderated by Addison Snell of Intersect360 Research. Our customer panelists were Michael Resch from HLRS, Satoshi Matsuoka from the University of Tokyo. On the vendor side, we had Jean-Marc Denis from Bull and Andrew Jones from the NAG group. They all did a terriffic job, but Resch was definitely the crowd favorite with home-field advantage.
The idea for Analyst Crossfire was actually spawned here in Hamburg at ISC’10. The show had wrapped and I was sitting in the Radisson lobby bar a number of Sun alums. Addison arrived and started grilling us on various HPC topics and only giving us like 30 seconds to answer. We had a great time ranking each other’s opinions, and I thought, this would be great to do at SC10.
A year later, today’s program was actually our third Analyst Crossfire show. While we wait for the footage to get edited together, you can see the SC10 version and the live one we did at HPCC in Newport in April.
Resch was great because he expressed his true feelings and never sugar coated an answer. People appreciate honesty. Plain and simple.