HAMBURG, Germany, June 21, -- The 2012 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’12) concluded its 27^th meeting after drawing a record 2,403 attendees and 175 of the leading high performance computing vendors and research organizations from around the world. ISC’12 was held June 17-21 at the Congress Center Hamburg. 

Since it was first held as a seminar with 81 participants in 1986, the conference has become Europe’s largest HPC event and in 2012 drew participants from 57 nations. The format of the conference program has also evolved and this year’s blend of keynote talks, panel discussions, less formal chats and specialized presentations generated many compliments – and large audiences. Eighty-two journalists and analysts focusing on HPC also attended ISC.

“Even though we keep setting attendance records each year, it’s exciting when we reach or projected goal and having 2,403 attendees this year was very gratifying,” said ISC Executive Director Martin Meuer. “It’s also exciting to see so many members of the HPC community in Asia making the trip to Germany to join us.”

In fact, it was a group of students from Tsinghua University in China who were overall winners of the Student Cluster Competition, in which five teams of students competed to build and configure cluster computers, then run a series of applications to see which team could get the best performance. The three-day competition was sponsored by the HPC Advisory Council. Here are the highlights:

• The “Overall Winner” award for the most aggregate points for all the benchmarks included in the competition went Tsinghua University. The team was also recognized for understanding the impact of weak and strong scaling on application performance.
• The team from China’s National University of Defense of Technology built the highest core count system in a hybrid architecture. The team also received an award for achieving the highest LINPACK score of 2.65 Teraflops.
• The team from Stony Brook University in New York was recognized for impressive troubleshooting and overcoming hardware and software challenges.
• The University of Colorado team was the first to run all the applications—including the secret ones.
• ISC’12 attendees voted the team from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) as the “Fan Favorite.” The KIT team also achieved the highest performance running the LINPACKbenchmark on an x86-based cluster.

At a reception in Hamburg City Hall hosted by the Hamburg Senate, ISC’12 General Chair Prof. Hans Meuer recognized the longtime contributions of Prof. Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Prof. Thomas Ludwig of the German Climate Computing Center and University of Hamburg by making them ISC Fellows. 

After four years in Hamburg, ISC will move to the historic city of Leipzig in eastern Germany in 2013. ISC’13 will be held June 16-20, 2013. Leipzig has hosted trade fairs since 1165 and has long been a center for culture, learning and research. For more information, go to www.isc13.org.

High-quality images of the five day conference and exhibition are available for download at http://www.flickr.com/photos/64094857@N04/.

About ISC’12

Now in its 27th year, ISC is the world’s oldest and one of the most important conferences for the HPC community, offering a strong five-day technical program with a wide range of expert speakers and exhibits from leading research centers and vendors. A number of events complement the technical program, including Tutorials, Workshops, Top500 Announcement, Research Paper Sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) Sessions, Research Poster Session, Think Tank Series, Analyst Crossfire, Exhibitor and Start-up Forums, and the popular Hot Seat Sessions in a new format featuring leaders from industry and research centers. The conference has experienced tremendous growth over the last few years, with an estimated 2,400 participants from around the world expected to convene in Hamburg, June 17 – 21.

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Source: ISC'12