ACADEMIA

The 23rd Annual International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’08) brought almost 1,400 HPC industry leaders, IT specialists and scientists from around the world to the Congress Center in Dresden this week, making it the most successful ISC in conference history and topping last year’s record attendance of 1,213. Participants from 46 countries attended this year’s conference, Europe’s premier HPC event, which began with preconference programs on June 17 and ended Friday, June 20. The largest number of participants came from Germany, followed by the U.S., the UK, France and Switzerland. Participants came to Dresden from around the globe, including China, Turkey, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia. The conference also featured 90 exhibits from industry powerhouses such as Intel, Microsoft, IBM and HP to smaller companies providing hardware, software, storage and networking solutions to research labs demonstrating scientific applications of supercomputing. Fifteen exhibitors were attending the conference for the first time. The overall size of the exhibit floor grew from 846 square meters in 2007 to 1,020 square meters, completely filling the exhibit space. After three years in Dresden, the conference has outgrown the Congress Center in Dresden and will relocate to Hamburg next year. “We are thrilled with the participation this year, and Hamburg will give more members of the HPC community— in Europe, Asia and the Americas—the chance to attend ISC,” said ISC Chairman Prof. Hans Meuer. “We have been talking to participants all week to help us understand what they like about the conference and how we can improve, and many of them have told us this is an essential conference to attend if you want to reach the European market and talk to colleagues and customers in an informal atmosphere.” Among the highlights of ISC’08 was the introduction of the world’s first petascale computer on the 31st Top500 list. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory’s “Roadrunner” system, built by IBM, achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s—more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second. Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500 list. Other highlights of ISC’08 included: • Preconference programs on automotive applications in HPC, cluster computing and scientific applications of HPC, where participants had the chance to share in-depth information about these topics. • Keynotes on the most important issues in the field, including grid computing and the emergence of multicore computing for the masses. • A focus on HPC efforts in Europe, including PRACE, a European alliance for “Promotion of Supercomputers and Petacomputing Technology”. • The highest ranking ever of a Microsoft HPC Server System on the Top500 list, with Abe, 68.5 teraflop/s system at NCSA. • News from industry exhibitors, including demonstrations of QDR (40 gigabit per second (Gbp/s)) switches from Voltaire and Qlogic’s new DDR InfiniBand HCA. ISC’09 will be held June 23 – 26, 2009 at the Congress Center, Hamburg. For more information, please see its Web site.