| Dresden 18 June 2008
In this third year the International Supercomputing Conference is hosted in Dresden we are rediscovering the feeling of community, established over the ISC years, according to Prof.Dr. Hans Meuer in the opening session, today. This conference edition is welcoming more than 1350 participants this year, in comparison with 1213 attendees in 2007. Yesterday, there was the official opening of the exhibition in a joyous atmosphere of meeting again the familiar faces at the expanded exhibition floor space with delicious food, beer and wine, and live music. Two pre-conference sessions addressing the automotive industry and cluster world and two scientific sessions have been taking place in the afternoon. Starting today, participants will enjoy three days' conference sessions with handpicked international expert speakers.
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In his opening speech Prof.Dr. Meuer promised the ISC attentees lively discussions and real-world benefits for the panelists. He presented a helicopter view of this year's programme which started off with the traditional keynote on the June edition of the TOP500. Another keynote later this day features Thomas Sterling, putting the past year in perspective for the fifth consecutive year. In the next days the famous Hot seats for vendors will take with some tough questions from the panel experts.
Actual topics will be addressed in five sessions:
- Climate modelling moderated by Walter Zwieflhofer from ECMWF, UK.
- European HPC projects PRACE, PROSPECT and TALOS chaired by Francesc Subirado from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
- Harnessing the potential of multicore and manycore processors moderated by Prof. Dr. Per Stenström from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
- Panel discussion on "Is HPC Going Green?" chaired by Prof. Dr. Horst Simon from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA. Panelists are from the USA, Japan and Germany.
- HPC Challenges and Opportunities in the Petaflop/s Era moderated by Prof. Dr. Thomas Sterling from Louisiana State University, USA. Gordon Bell Prize winner John Salmon of D.E. Shaw will present the keynote address.
This year the exhibition hall provides floorspace to 87 international exhibitors. Special activities consist of six exhibitor forum sessions, 12 Bird-of-a-Feather sessions and, of course, the research poster sessions.
This evening, there will be a special panel session about the RoadRunner, the first petaflop/s system in the world and its impact on supercomputing, chaired by Prof. Dr. Hans Meuer. By 'RoadRunner' he means the New Mexican state bird, not the supercomputer because the legal department of IBM has warned Prof.Dr. Meuer that it objects against the use of the name of RoadRunner. He has to be careful according to the IBM lawyers but Dresden is close to the Polish border so he can escape if the need should arise.
"Should you be using the term 'petaflop' either?" asked Prof.Dr. Meuer's lawyer anxiously. Drs. Andrew White from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Don Grice from IBM, USA were smiling with consent. All will be handled in gentleman's agreement during the Microsoft++ HPC Get Together Party at the Congress Center Terraces, for sure.
Prof.Dr. Meuer ended his talk by thanking the ISC'08 sponsors, by welcoming the speakers from all over the world and all the committees and his friends from the Technische Universität Dresden, and by expressing his wishes for an inspiring conference. |
