SCO8: Planes, Pianos, and Automobiles
SC08 was incredible! This year’s show had over 10,000 attendees with companies and laboratories covering the globe. As Tony Burrous and I moved about the main exhibition hall, It was very easy to get engulfed in the many displays, lectures, and technical overviews of the show. However, some highlights included a gathering of 400 or so devoted Beowulf followers at Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar, an actual Formula One race car, and a multitude of 3D airplane simulations, 3D glasses included.
The show had a resounding theme that HPC is moving into the main stream. Some companies that stick out in this arena are ScaleMP and Interactive SuperComputing. Both companies are leveraging the ability to simplify solutions to gain greater compute ability. ScaleMP has a technology that will make multiple servers act as one SMP computer, thereby maximizing application scalability without having to learn parallel coding. In addition, Interactive SuperComputing’s software Star-P will automatically parallelize Matlab and Python opportunities with a simple file extension. Both companies highlight the push of HPC into the smaller and medium size businesses that don’t have the expertise or budget to learn how to parallelize their applications.
We were also lucky enough to speak to many great people including David Flynn, CTO of the stealth Fusion-IO. This company has a very impressive backing and board, and some even more impressive companies testing out their state of the art Static State Disks (SSD).
Two of the clear winners of the week, were Microsoft and HP with impressive booths sharing partner experiences to leverage complete deliverable solutions. Last week was a geeks dream and a small or medium businesses opportunity to learn how to continue to compete in the ever challenging economy of today.