The HPC Advisory Council has announced that it has grown global membership to over 200 member organizations. Members include best-in-class original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), strategic technology suppliers, independent software vendors (ISVs), worldwide universities and higher education, national laboratories and selected end-users across the entire range of high-performance computing (HPC) market segments. The complete list of members can be found on the Council website. Formed in May of 2008, the HPC Advisory Council’s mission is to bridge the gap between high-performance computing use and its potential, as well as to bring the beneficial capabilities of HPC to new users for better research, education, innovation and product manufacturing.

“The growth in membership in such a short period of time is a testament to the Council’s ongoing application best practices and training activities performed to date and the real-world benefits being received by end-users worldwide,” said Gilad Shainer, chairman of the HPC Advisory Council. “Due to our member support, the Council has quickly become a valuable educational and support resource for IT end-users with a range of educational opportunities. These can include basic fundamentals such as setting up and configuring a cluster to more advanced open source or commercial HPC and cloud-based application performance guidelines and best practices.”

With over 50 best practices developed for over 26 HPC and cloud-based applications, the HPC Advisory Council is providing the HPC end-user community valuable information to improve their system and application usage. Such applications include, but are not limited to, automotive design, weather forecasting, chemical and biological interactions, crash simulations and atmospheric research. For more information, please visit the HPC Advisory Council Best Practices website.

The HPC Advisory Council also holds multiple workshops throughout the year that focus on HPC education, hands-on and classroom training and overviews of new important HPC developments and trends. The next workshop will be held in Lugano, Switzerland from March 21-23, 2011. Key topics include comprehensive training and hands-on learning for high-speed networking and storage, GPU-based computing, improving MPI performance and will also include advanced topics and development for upcoming HPC technologies. For the complete agenda and schedule, please refer to the workshop website. The 3-day workshop is CHF 80.00. Registration is required, and can be made at the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Workshop registration page.