As I explained in my last post, the “official” birth of the SC17 conference was on November 17, 2016, 8:25. However, only a day later, I am “really officially” in charge of the SC conference, when in a little behind-the-scences ceremony, the Key of the SC Conference was passed on form the past chair (John West, SC16) to me.
It is a SC tradition that on Thursday of the SC conference (this year: November 17th), next year’s conference is unveiled to the public. In some sense, it is the “official” birth of the SC17 conference, even if I started to work on its organization now almost two years ago.
SC is not only a large technical conference with technical paper presentations, tutorials, workshops or panels, but also features a Research and Industry Exhibition where (this year) 349 exhibitors from industry, academia and research organizations from around the world presented their latest products, research and concepts in exhibition booths. Setting up the exhibition is quite some effort and actually starts days before the opening of the conference (and the exhibition).
From November 13th to 18th, 2016, SC16, the 28th annual international conference of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, took place in Salt Lake City, Utah. Like every year the past 27 years, the conference was very successful and drew more than 11,100 registered attendees and featured a technical program spanning six days. The exhibit hall featured 349 exhibitors from industry, academia and research organizations from around the world.
While there is always a lot of buzz about the latest HPC hardware architecture developments or exascale programming methods and tools, everyone agrees that in the end the only thing that counts are the results and societal impact produced by the technology. Results and impacts are coming from the scientific and industrial applications running on HPC systems. The application space is diverse ranging from astrophysics (A) to zymology (Z). So the question arises of how to effectively fund development and optimization of HPC applications to make them suitable for current petascale and future exascale systems.
On August 3 and 4, 2016, we had our third SC17 planning meeting in the SC17 conference city, Denver, Colorado. In Germany, we would call this August meeting “mountain party” (“Bergfest”) , as we reached now the halftime in our three year quest to organize the SC17 conference, and after 18 months of steep, hard, up-hill work to reach the summit, the second half of the trip should be easier and down-hill. Of course, the future will show whether it is really down-hill 😉
On June 9, 2016, we had our second SC17 planning meeting in Snowbird, Utah. It is actually a ski winter resort which means you can rent it for meetings in summer for quite some low rate 😉 Why Snowbird? Well, the meeting is traditionally in the city of the conference the year before which is Salt Lake City this year (2016). However, due to some other event in the city during the week, all hotels were completely booked, so the meeting was relocated to Snowbird nearby. It is a very nice place but being located at 2468 meters above sea level, you had to drink a lot of water all day in order not to get elevation sick 😉
On March 28 to 30, 2016, we had our first SC17 Planning meeting in Denver, Colorado. This is just a small, first meeting of the Executive Committee, i.e., the Chairs for Technical Program, Communication, Exhibits, Local Arrangements, SCinet, Students@SC, Communications, and Finance, the Deputy Chair, the Vice Chair, the Executive Director, a representative of ACM, and me.
What do you do if you have two meetings to attend in the U.S. within two weeks (one in Salt Lake City, the other in Denver) with just a weekend in between and flying separately to the two meetings across the Atlantic is about four times more expensive than a single trip combining both? You spent a nice extended weekend driving through the Rocky Mountains!
Being SC17 General Chair also means that I am SC16 Deputy Chair “shadowing” the SC16 General Chair John West which means that I watch and learn from him at all meetings and at the conference in 2016, so I am well prepared for the conference organization work “my” year.
Yesterday, I gave an invited talk at the Multicore@Siemens 2016 conference in Nürnberg about the performance analysis of parallel applications. While in our high-performance computing center at JSC, we have to deal with large-scale scientific applications running on our world-class very scalable HPC systems like JURECA or JUQUEEN, software developers in general deal with much smaller systems.
Travel for my job often means visiting colleagues all over the world at their high-performance computing centers. In this first part of a new mini-series (“HPC Centres Around the World”), I would like to show you the most beautiful HPC machine room of the world at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
This is the second part of my “Things you never wanted to learn about SC, but I tell you anyhow!” (TynwtlaSC,bItya!) posts 😉 If you go to the same conference every year for a long time you collect some nice experiences and memories, but also you collect quite some souvenirs (ask my wife about it!)…. Read More
