HPCwire: Executive Guide to SC08: Making the Most of the Conference

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November 10, 2008

Executive Guide to SC08: Making the Most of the Conference

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The annual Supercomputing (SC) conference is the most important gathering of high performance computing professionals in the United States. You'd like to make sure that your time there is well spent, but SC can easily overwhelm attendees. It is all too easy to end up wandering the show floor for three days with the vague sense that you're missing something.

There is certainly a lot to be learned by visiting the hundreds of university, commercial, and government exhibitors on the show floor. But the conference offers many more experiences that will expose you to new people, new ideas, and new relationships with the potential to transform the way you think about high performance computing. So how do you avoid missing out on what's important to you?

We've created the HPCwire Executive Guide to SC08 to help you make sense of the myriad technical tracks, meetings, briefings, and activities that all compete for your attention during this busy week.

This guide is not a Cliff's Notes version of the SC08 Program Guide: you won't find everything here that the conference has to offer. The HPCwire team has studied the conference technical program, and used our understanding of the trends and technology that are shaping the industry to highlight what we feel are the key sessions, talks, and events to attend to get a better understanding of HPC today.

The attendees at SC are as diverse as the topics covered, and we know that not all of what we've picked out will be relevant to you. You'll no doubt have meetings to attend, and other topics will grab your interest. None of this is a problem, because the recommendations in this guide are independent.

Have a free hour on Tuesday? Drop in on the Michael Dell keynote session. Want to get a handle on the issues driving today's concerns about computational support infrastructure? You'll find sessions and panels during the week in the guide that will help grow your understanding.

Picking out the trends: four key SC08 themes you need to follow

SC08 is a study in diversity. At this conference you'll find researchers working on tomorrow's new programming language, vendors selling today's latest hardware, and the world's largest providers of supercomputing resources hunting for ways to do a better job for their users.

There is certainly something for everyone at SC. But we've tried to look past the dizzying variety of supercomputing and see larger patterns in the conference—the themes that will help you understand HPC today, and where it is headed tomorrow.

There are four key themes in this year's conference that bind together much of what is happening in the technical program. Whether you are a technical manager or a senior executive with HPC in your portfolio, these are the trends that you'll need to understand as you move forward throughout this next year.

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