By Dan Olds, Gabriel Consulting • Get more from this author
We’re closing in on SC11, the annual HPC love fest that kicks off this year in Seattle on November 12th. The SC (stands for Super Computing) events are different from every other industry gathering.
They are part educational symposium, with hundreds of hours of sessions where researchers present their findings and HPC experts hold forth on timely and important topics. There’s also the show floor, where vendors and users (primarily research labs and education orgs) alike show off their latest work.
A lot of business happens at these shows. It’s the best opportunity for vendors to talk to their HPC customers and present their latest cutting edge products. On the SC show floor, you’ll see new technology well before it gets turned into products for the commercial computing market.
Just as many of the advances we’ve seen in automobiles came out of racing, many of the technical advances that we now take for granted in enterprise computing were pioneered in HPC. And the SC show floor is where you can see, touch, and learn about these new cutting edge products way before they hit the general market.
The research booths are equally fascinating. Where else can you talk face-to-face with world class researchers about their work? At SC, they’re pulling booth duty and are more than happy to talk about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and why it’s important. If you want to see how science is done these days and learn about where it’s going – the SC11 show floor is the place to be.
But it’s not all science, all the time at SC. This year, there’s going to be an area devoted to the history of gaming – with old arcade games that attendees can play. You can also challenge IBM’s Watson system to a game of Jeopardy, or participate in the Data Intensive scavenger hunt to win prizes and glory.
Trish Damkroger is the maestro of the SC11 exhibits this year. During the day, she’s the deputy associate director of computation for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but this year she’s in charge of putting together the exhibits portion of SC11. In this webcast, Trish gives us an overview of what we’ll see in Seattle this year. We talk about how the exhibits have changed over the years and some of the specific attractions at the show this year.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69V3rvcAx4U&
This article originally appeared in The Register. It appears here in its entirety as part of a cross-publishing agreement.
