The 26th annual Supercomputing Conference (SC14) was a show to remember. The six day event brought together more than 10,000 attendees to the expansive Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, La., last week, breaking a few records and establishing several firsts for the high-profile conference series.
If you were one of the 10,198 registered attendees at the event, you may have noticed an unusually large exhibit space housed inside the Convention Center, which is itself the sixth largest events facility in the nation. Indeed, at 141,800 square feet, this was the largest show floor in SC’s history, the equivalent of six football fields. According to SC General Chair Trish Damkroger of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the large area provided booth space for 356 exhibitors from industry, academia and research organizations. 58 of these were first-timers, and 122 were international exhibitors.
The event also welcomed the first ever HPC Matters Plenary, formally christening a communications and media campaign that had been building since it was introduced at SC13 in Denver. The plenary, led by SGI’s Dr. Eng Lim Goh, as well as the related videos and other collateral, serve as a reminder to those inside and outside the community about the power of inspiration and meaningful engagement. How can you get the message out?
The conference also turned New Orleans into the world’s fastest computer networking hub thanks to SCinet, which has become an SC Conference institution. The network links the Convention Center to research and commercial networks around the world, using 84 miles of fiber deployed throughout the convention center and $18 million in loaned equipment. With 1.2 Terabits of bandwidth to the conference center, the platform enables exhibitors to demonstrate the advanced computing resources of their home institutions and elsewhere by supporting a wide range of bandwidth-driven applications. In an amazing show of collaboration and dedication, 125 volunteers from academic, research and industry organizations around the world work for over a year to bring this cutting-edge network to life for one week before disassembling it and starting all over again.
Along with the exhibit, SC also hosts a world-class Technical Program, offering the best of original HPC research from a wide variety of HPC-relevant topics. Acceptance into the program was competitive with an acceptance rate of approximately 21 percent from over 394 submissions.
Overall, the Tech Program welcomed:
84 Birds-of-a-Feathers
81 Papers
14 Panels
76 Posters
23 ACM Student Research Posters
33 Tutorials
35 Workshops
12 Invited Speakers
Also Noteworthy
The SC14 Job Fair reached maximum levels of participation this year with 30 organizations represented.
The event had close to 70 student volunteers.
The Student Cluster Competition was also the largest yet with 12 teams from the US and around the world.
The Gordon Bell Prize, awarded each year in recognition of outstanding achievement in high-performance computing, was given out by none other than Gordon Bell himself (congrats Anton 2).