BIG DATA

The SC conference series has a long history of challenging the supercomputing community to reach higher than ever before, and this year that tradition continues with four Challenges that will showcase the expertise and high performance computing resources at SC08. The Challenges – Bandwidth, HPC Storage, Analytics and the Cluster Challenge – will provide a way to showcase both expertise and high performance computing resources at SC08 in friendly yet spirited competitions with other participants. Registration for SC08 Technical Program is now open. In addition to the four Challenges, this year’s Technical Program will include two days of tutorials, three days of technical paper presentations, a keynote address and other invited speakers, seven panel discussions a flock of birds-of-a-feather sessions, poster presentations and more. For more information about registration categories and rates and to register, go to its Web site. The Bandwidth Challenge, now in its ninth year, is an annual competition for leading-edge network applications developed by teams of researchers from around the globe. This year's Challenge will focus on real-world applications and data movement issues, and will include live demonstrations across the SCinet network infrastructure. The HPC Storage Challenge showcases innovation in storage architecture and implementation. Entrants first describe their implementations and present measurements of performance, scalability and storage subsystem utilization in submission proposals. Judging will be based on these measurements as well as innovation and effectiveness. Finalists will present their completed results in a technical session during the conference. The Cluster Challenge will showcase the amazing power of clusters and the ability to harness open source software to solve interesting and important problems. Teams will compete in real time on the exhibit floor, where they will run a workload of real-world problems on clusters of their own design. The Analytics Challenge showcases solutions created by researchers and industry that embody all facets of high performance computing, from processing to data visualization. Past finalists have presented solutions in areas as diverse as orthodontics, atomic energy, and music classification. This year's finalists will present their submissions in a special session at SC08. For more information about Challenge-related presentations, visit the SC08 Challenges web page at sc08.supercomputing.org/?pg=challenges.html. SC08, sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, will showcase how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce. This premiere international conference includes technical and education programs, workshops, tutorials, an exhibit area, demonstrations and hands-on learning. For more information, please visit its Web site..