Welcome to ISC High Performance 2018

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Thomas Meuer (left) and Martin Meuer are co-Chairs of the annual ISC High Performance conference.

In this special guest post, Martin Meuer and Thomas Meuer welcome attendees to ISC 2018, which takes place June 24-28 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Today ISC High Performance stands proudly as a globally recognized HPC event, driven by the extensive involvement of the high performance computing community. The contribution of new topics, speakers, stringent review processes, as well as diversity efforts, makes ISC distinctive.

There are a number of key facets to this distinctiveness. First, we are a truly international forum; over 70 percent of our attendees and exhibitors are from outside Germany, representing about 65 countries. This geographic diversity is apparent in our list of speakers, committees and the exhibition. Another unique aspect of the conference is the balance between academia and industry attendees, with 59 and 41 percent representation, respectively. Addressing their individual challenges and needs, we offer full-day sessions, such as the Industrial Day and Machine Learning Day.

Furthermore, the 2018 Program Chair, Horst Simon, has introduced topics like climate change, cosmology, HPC in medicine and artificial intelligence on HPC platforms, to spur interesting conversations between researchers and vendors at the conference. He also ensured that this year’s keynotes are about projects with global impacts. On Monday, Dr. Maria Girone will speak about the computing challenges of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, while Dr. Keren Bergman will speak on Tuesday about research in optical interconnection networks for advanced computing systems.

This year we are also hosting the largest ISC exhibition, with 162 exhibitors. Take the time to meet the vendors and research organizations, whose products and technologies help advance science and engineering.

In recognizing underappreciated talent and to help alleviate the gender gap, we introduced a gender diversity strategy in 2017. As a result, this year almost 40 percent of our distinguished and keynote speakers are women. Even our student volunteer program received a record-breaking number of applications from female university students.

The ISC STEM Program returns to the benefit of 200 university students, where we provide them free access to the conference, a custom-made tutorial and career advice. This year we also set up the ISC Travel Grant to enable a student and a young researcher, who otherwise lack funding, to join us at the conference.

Here we thank all the chairs and committee members for their dedication in elevating the quality of the research program with peer-to-peer review process. We are also happy to see the number of research paper, tutorial, workshop and other submissions increase dramatically. We also thank our sponsors, partners, helpers and our team for their support.

Finally, we have put together some football-related activities and hope you’ll participate in them. Let’s celebrate HPC and the World Cup at ISC 2018.

Best regards,

Martin Meuer and Thomas Meuer, ISC High Performance General Co-Chairs

Check out our insideHPC Events Calendar