In about 30 minutes, I’ll begin my 9-hour journey to Reno, Nevada to attend the 2007 conference on supercomputing, networking storage and analysis otherwise known as SC’07. One of my responsibilities over the last 4 years has been to manage a supercomputer cluster. We started out with a 48-node cluster made of relatively inexpensive generic PCs. I’ve since replaced that with a system based on multi-core multi-processor server blades. Hopefully the information and experience gained at this conference will help me improve the performance of this new cluster. Plus, on the geeky side, I’ll get to see all sorts of expensive gear I’d probably never see otherwise. 🙂 Oh yea, and it’s in Reno.
TechThink
An IT geek's weblog
9 hours later and I’m finally here. This conference is huge. Unfortunately the show floor doesn’t open until Tuesday, but from what I can see so far, it’s going to be difficult to see everything. I’ve already made out my itinerary, but still, there are so many things to see and do. Hopefully I’ll have some pictures to show later on…
I spent yesterday at an all-day workshop on many/multi-core processors and the implications it has for the HPC community. I did get a lot of good information out of it, but wow talk about getting your mind blown. Probably the best part of it was actually getting to talk to engineers from AMD and NVidia. Well, better run.. here we go for day #2…
Yesterday was mostly uneventful until the opening gala for the exhibit floor. A senior fellow from Intel talked about the future of their products for the next 10-20 years which was quite interesting. The gala was really fun. I got to talk to people from SGI, Sun, Fermilab, Oak Ridge, NASA and AMD. The great thing is that it’s not just a bunch of sales people. There are some, but there are also lots of really talented engineers and scientists that know this stuff inside and out. I need to run across the street at some point today so I can get a card reader and post some pics of the really cool stuff on display.