The Juggernaut that is SC

Sunday I attend the First International Workshop on Heterogeneous Computing with Reconfigurable Logic in the morning

followed by the IBM GPFS User Group Meeting. I don't have photos of the GPFS user group meeting as they made us sign an NDA at the door. In the end there was no NDA material that I could see in there. It looked like half the attendees were from IBM. Even so I was surprised at the numbers. I skipped breakfast and lunch so was keen for dinner. That evening we went to a sushi bar that was close. Jake Carroll from the Queensland Brain Institute at UQ came along. He gets to a lot of international conferences and had met Elon Musk. Richard was intrigued. We ordered a couple of sushi boats which came with a selection of things to try. It was OK. What can I say, I'm not a sushi person.

Monday we had breakfast with Mellanox first up.

Monday was another workshop day. I attended parts of the Tenth Workshop on Parallel Data Storage. The keynote was pretty cool - holographic storage is coming - hopefully. http://akoniaholographics.com/ There were a couple of Dell briefings during the day back at our hotel.
In the evening Intel made some announcements.

This is the front half of the room before it was filled. Not everybody would have been there as the conference proper does not start until the Tuesday.

There was a function afterwards in the exhibition hall but we had organised a dinner with Bright Computing and Dell. They took us to a nice place called Trulucks

Richard and I felt pretty seedy the next day, but we both managed to make it to the Plenary, given by Alan Alda.

He is an advocate for Science and talked about how most scientists are poor communicators and suggested how they could do better, and how important that is to society. After this we had a briefing with nVidia at a hotel a few blocks from the convention center. We grabbed some brunch at a crepe place that was local and then headed back to conference proper. I managed to get to the exibition for the first time. It was overwhelming.

The above photo shows the overhead row numbers receding into the distance. The one below shows a more aerial view.

 This is a floor plan of the exhibition hall.


Something a little topical: A German University simulation of diesel injection and the turbulent flow caused by nozzle tip geometry. Apparently VW don't simulate this process and just try lots of prototypes. The guy talking to me thought his job prospects were good!

That evening we attended a Cray function and did some networking with other conference goers.