National Labs have Pulled Their Booths from SC12

Over at the New York Times, Laura Dattaro writes that Federal Budget limits are deeply affecting scientific conferences, including SC12.

Last year, for instance, 564 people from the Energy Department attended the 2011 Supercomputing Conference to meet with private groups, speak and present new research. The department’s 12 laboratories — including Fermilab in Illinois, Brookhaven on Long Island, Los Alamos in New Mexico and Oak Ridge in Tennessee — set up booths to exhibit their latest projects, allowing them to demonstrate their work in a hands-on setting that is vital to the scientific process, critics of the spending policy say. But next month, when 11,000 hardware and software developers and vendors gather in Salt Lake City for the 2012 Supercomputing Conference, or SC12, none of the Energy Department’s labs will have their own booths on the 125,000-square-foot exhibit floor, and there will be 172 fewer agency employees, organizers estimate, than in 2011.

As first reported here, four DoE booths pulled out of their exhibits at SC12 as early as August. When I checked the SC12 exhibitor list this morning, the rest of the National Labs were missing including Oak Ridge, Sandia, Argonne, etc.

Has the SC12 committee come forward with these developments? No. We have to read about it in the Times.

According to Dattaro, DoE is still sending nearly 400 employees to participate in the technical program. Read the Full Story.

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  1. […] on October 30, 2012 by Joe Rich B at InsideHPC.com posts about the national labs exit from floorspace at SC12. The claim is due to budget cuts, but the GSA scandal and its fallout likely have a higher […]

Comments

  1. I truly see this a victory for the tax payer. Having been inside this industry for 10 years and attended many SC (both on the government nickel and the public traded company nickel), the is more partying and swag hunting than people realize.

    I do support the attendance of the 400 scientists to the technical program, but the booths were getting ridiculous. A single DoE booth makes sense but individual ones is lunacy.

    If the DoD Mod program could reign its sites, DoE should be able to as well.

    Just my $0.02

  2. DoD HPCMP has pulled out as well.

  3. I am fron Argonne and I know that Argonne was there, in IBM booth 1018