HPCwire: Reflections on The Newport Conference -- HPCC-08

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May 19, 2008

Reflections on The Newport Conference -- HPCC-08

Mike Bernhardt, General Manager, Tabor Marketing Group

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Now that several piles of urgent memos have been cleared from my desk, I wanted to share some thoughts on the National High Performance Computing & Communications (HPCC) conference that took place in Newport, Rhode Island, at the end of March.

This was the 22nd annual conference, and I have to say, this one was particularly enjoyable.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this conference, many HPC insiders affectionately refer to this event as "the Newport conference." It's a very intimate event that is purposely limited to no more than 120 attendees. While the conference always has some interesting and timely presentations, this event is really about networking and lively interaction.

And, if you haven't heard about the "lively" panel discussion moderated by Bob Feldman of HPC Marketing, well, I plan to cover that in a subsequent article. It was entertaining, to say the least. And, Intel's Stephen Wheat's passionate plea for the participants to become more aware of national competitiveness and our search for the next generation of HPC movers and shakers is worthy of an article on its own.

But for now, I'd like to share some thoughts from an informal survey I conducted among the attendees regarding their views of the best presentations.

Hands down, the recognition for best presentation delivered at HPCC-08 goes to Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI's Chief Technical Officer. He took a presentation that many people would have butchered into boredom or technical chaos, "Challenges in designing a petaflop system, to run applications that are not embarrassingly parallel, before 2010," and delivered it in a style that identifies him as a true thought leader and HPC evangelist.

I've seen Eng Lim present at this conference and others on numerous occasions. He's consistently an excellent presenter. But his presentation at this conference was exceptional. Maybe it was the setting or the intimacy of the group of familiar faces, but numerous people gave me the same feedback. His "passion" and "enthusiasm" came through loud and clear and contributed to a very entertaining and captivating presentation. He held everyone's attention with great examples of visualization and humorous anecdotal stories, all wrapped up in a well-paced presentation that was delivered with warmth and sincerity.

The magic combination: Great content. Entertaining Delivery. Authentic Leadership. Well done Eng Lim.

Three other presenters received enough votes that I feel comfortable ranking them in a three-way tie for second place in the category of "most interesting and memorable presentations." Kudos go to:

Dr. David Shaw, Chief Scientist of D.E. Shaw Research. His presentation was on "Anton," a great case study that demonstrates the need for specialized capability machines. David's research group is currently building a highly specialized, massively parallel machine, targeted for completion in late 2008, with the goal of executing millisecond-scale, classical molecular dynamic simulations of one or more proteins at an atomic level of detail.

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