ISC 2017 Sets New Record with 3200 Attendees

FRANKFURT, Germany, June 19, 2017 — Over the next four days, ISC High Performance will be unveiling the latest HPC technologies and their application in research and commercial environments. As of 8:30 a.m. today, 3200 HPC enthusiasts from 60 countries have registered for the conference, a three percent increase over 2017 attendance.

The event also received an international media spotlight, with 60 technical and business journalists on site to provide live coverage of the exhibition and the conference sessions.

A Little History

ISC High Performance turned 32 this year, making it the world’s oldest HPC community forum and Europe’s largest HPC exhibition. Frankfurt is the conference’s sixth destination, following Mannheim, Heidelberg, Dresden, Hamburg, and Leipzig.

Some Conference Highlights:

Conference Keynote – Monday, June 19

Big data scientist Dr. Jennifer Chayes Tour of Microsoft Research delivered the opening keynote on Network Science. She talked about how massive data networks are challenging our conventional models in database management and are spurring new applications. Please refer to the agenda planner for more on the keynote abstract.

TOP500 Announcement – Monday, June 19

The 49th edition of the list was announced at 10:30 am this morning at ISC High Performance. In the latest rankings, the Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, maintained its top position. With a Linpack performance of 93 petaflops, TaihuLight is far and away the most powerful number-cruncher on the planet.

ISC Fellows Appointments – Monday, June 19

Dr. Erich Strohmaier of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, and Prof. Yutong Lu from the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou, China were added to the list of ISC High Performance Fellows, which currently boasts eight fellows. ISC Fellows are individuals who have made, and continue to make, important contributions toward the advancement of high performance computing (HPC), the community, and the ISC High Performance conference series.

The ISC Industrial Day – Tuesday, June 20

A full-day program awaits industrial HPC users and will specifically address challenges in the industrial manufacturing, transport and logistics sectors. The Industrial Day is designed and chaired by high performance computing experts, Dr. Alfred Geiger of T-Systems and Dr. Marie-Christine Sawley of Intel Data Center Group. This program is a reflection of their own experiences derived from working with user communities, as well as expectations of past years’ attendees.

Hans Meuer Award – Tuesday, June 20

The research papers selected as finalists for the Hans Meuer Award this year focus on communication characteristics, and improving communication protocols of message passing interface (MPI) respectively. The winner will be announced before the Tuesday keynote.

In their paper, titled “An Overview of MPI Characteristics of Exascale Proxy Applications,” authors Benjamin Klenk and Prof. Holger Froening of Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg discuss a number of application characteristics, like time spent in certain operations, point-to-point versus collective communication, message sizes and rates, and how applications use MPI to exploit node-level parallelism. Dr. Hari Subromoni, Sourav Chakraborty and Prof. Dhabaleswar Panda, from The Ohio State University, authored “Designing Dynamic and Adaptive MPI Point-to-Point Communication Protocols for Efficient Overlap of Computation and Communication,” in which they propose an adaptive protocol design that dynamically optimizes the communication behavior of the application at runtime.

Second Keynote – Tuesday, June 20

This keynote address will be underlining the role high performance computing plays in the very pressing topic of weather and climate prediction. It will also reveal the ambitions the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has for the age of exascale computing. The Deputy Director of the Research Department Center at ECMWF in Reading, UK, Dr. Peter Bauer will speak on the existing science challenge, how that translates into computing and data challenges, and what steps the weather and climate prediction community is taking to prepare for the exascale era.

The Deep Learning Day – Wednesday, June 21

The overwhelming success of deep learning has triggered a race to build larger artificial neural networks, using growing amounts of training data. Such work challenges the capabilities of computer platforms, which will need to support massive data throughput and extreme computational performance. Hence, implementing deep learning at scale has become an emerging topic for the high performance computing (HPC) community. The program is designed and chaired by deep learning experts, Dr. -Ing Janis Keuper, senior scientist at The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM, and Dr. Damian Borth, director of the deep learning competence center at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

Closing Keynote, Wednesday, June 21

A perennial favorite at the conference, Prof. Thomas Sterling returns to take the ISC attendees on a reflective journey of the past 12 months in HPC, and examine what the future holds for the industry. His talk is titled: HPC Achievement and Impact – 2017.

Student Cluster Competition – Monday, June 19 – Wednesday, June 21

Eleven international student teams are on the show floor competing in the competition, and working around the clock to build and run applications on a supercomputer of their own design. Each day they are challenged with a new application. The winning team will be announced right before the Wednesday keynote.

ISC 2017 Exhibition – Monday, June 19 – Wednesday, June 21

A total of 148 exhibitors (100 vendors, 46 research and 2 media organizations)
Representing 26 countries
28 are first-time exhibitors

ISC 2017 Contributed Program:

ISC 2017 received a total of 275 submissions prompted by various calls. Here is the breakdown of the 141 that were accepted, which came from 23 nations: