Okay, here's my attempt at summarizing my SC13 experience. 1. The show was actually kind of boring this year. I think this was because there were now big new technologies or products to talk about. Also, there's usually a lot of activity at the NOAA and OLCF booths every years, and neither of those booths were there this year, which could contribute to that. Neither were there last year, but there were several industry announcements to make up for that. The DoE had one booth for all the DoE labs, and there really wasn't much activity there this year. Someone mentioned that the exihibitor floor was smaller than usual. In hindsight, I have to agree.
2. What I think was the biggest announcement of the show went unnoticed by most people: IBM and NVIDIA are teaming up to put a Power8 processor and NVIDIA GPU together. Thinks of 'Project Denver' but with a Power8 processor instead of an ARM. I think this is a first move towards an architecture for an Exascale system. Blue Genes and GPU clusters have been taking turns at the top of the Green500 list. ARM processors much more energy efficient than either, but don't have the floating-point performance. If these Power8 processors are as power-efficient as the processors in the Blue Gene products, then this (I think) is the best chance at reaching the 20 MW limit cited for an exascale system. I don't know much about the Power8 processor, so please don't skewer me if I'm completely wrong about it being very energy-efficient. 3. Once again, NVidia's schooled everyone else on how to have a busy booth that gets everyone's attention. Best location (on the corner of two busy walkways, as usual), large screen facing passers-by, and great audio making it easy to hear the presentations without being annoyingly loud. And they're green scarves are the best give-away of the conference : their practical, have an air of exclusivity which makes everyone want to wear theirs, turning many attendees into walking advertisements for NVidia. Why more vendors don't take lessons from NVidia is beyond me. Seriously. When it comes to marketing at SC13, Nvidia makes everyone else look like a bunch of chumps. 4. I went to a BoF on ROI on HPC investment. All the presentations in the BoF frustrated me. Not because they were poorly done, but because they tried to measure the value of a cluster by number of papers published that used that HPC resource. I think that's a crappy, crappy metric, but haven't been able to come up with a better one myself yet. I was very vocal with my comments and criticisms of the presentations, so if any of the presenters are reading this now, I apologize for hi-jacking your BoF. Getting good ROI on a cluster is close to my heart, but is also difficult to quantify and measure. I hope I can be part of the discussion next year. 5. There were a LOT of people at the D-Wave quantum computer presentation. 6. The NSA had the balls to have a booth there, looking to recruit people. My own politics aside, I though they were crazy. I know they're there every year, but scientists are known for liking openness, after the Edward Snowden revelations and the fact that the US govt. banned chinese scientists from a NASA conference (which led to boycotts of the conference), I would to keep a low-profile around scientists if I was part of the US Security/Defence complex. 7. The cover band 'London Calling' played the IBM Platform Computing/Intel party again. Despite calling themselves 'London Calling' they still do not play any Clash songs. They are a good cover band, but it's starting to get boring seeing the same band play the same set year after year. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
