Marc Hamilton from Sun shared his happiness with the two Sun entries in the Top 10. The Juropa cluster at Jülich is the most international collaboration you can imagine with Mellanox delivering Infiniband, Intel as the CPU provider, Russian benchmarking teams from Intel, ParTec providing the software stack, and collaboration with the France-based company Bull.

The strategic significance of HPC is crucial to Sun since it is very important for commercial purposes. The storage is important too, not only in science but also in media and entertainment.

HPC is posing new power and cooling challenges too which will have to be addressed. Furthermore, Sun is known for its open source products and systems.

Its motto "The network is the computer" especially is coming true now in Cloud computing.

Don Clegg from Supermicro introduced this young US-based company which has been around for 15 years now. Supermicro is the first in time-to-market with the broadest array of building blocks and showing an annual 30%+ growth rate. The products are not "one size fits all" and consist of the 2U Twin, the best of blades in a rack, and SuperBlade with 2 different family models as the core portfolio.

Don Clegg predicted that there would be double density in the following quarter.

The Supermicro GPU servers are general-purpose and there are 2 teraflops in one single CPU. The company is also a leader in energy and green IT.

Vince Mendillo from Microsoft talked about creating a platform for the HPC community: software tools

making parallelism more accessible. There are three fundamental issues. The first is to reduce the complexity with easy ease deployment for lager scale clusters; simplifying the management for clusters of all scale; and

integration with existing infrastructure. The second includes mainstream HPC to adress the needs of traditional supercomputing and emerging cross-industry computation trends, as well as enable non-technical users to harness the power of HPC.

The third issue is the creation of a broad ecosystem to increase the number of parallel applications and codes, to offer choice of parallel development tools, languages and libraries; and to drive larger universe systems.

Vince Mendillo also introduced the Windows HPC server 2008 R2 as a scalable HPC infrastructure for 1000+ nodes.

Richard Dracott from Intel said that about 80% now uses Intel architecture: 113 of 145 in EMEA. There were 33 Intel Xeon processor 5500 series entries within 3 months of introduction.

Solving real problems requires addressing I/O, he continued, by announcing a more than 60% improvement on Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5570 with Intel X25-E Extreme SSD platforms.

The Intel Cluster Ready Programme has enabled 23 major applications committed to deliver a simpler and product cluster experience to the end user. More than 20 system vendors serving the HPC Community are building and shipping certified systems. Twelve middleware partners are aligned, combining performance and ease of deployment. Over 30 examples of ICR systems and solutions are being showcased at ISC'09.

Intel in HPC is about terascale research, enhancing the manufacturing process, offering leading performance watt

and platform building blocks, providing a defined HPC application platform with a broad software tools portfolio and dedicated renowned expertise.

Currently there exists a strong Intel Xeon processor 5500 momentum with the Intel high-end enterprise leadership today.

Gilad Shainer from Mellanox introduced the HPC Advisory Council to the audience. It is a worldwide HPC organisation with over 80 members which bridges the gap between HPC usage and its potential and provides best practices. 50% of the members are vendors and 50% are users. Around 22 members are active in this ISC'09 Conference with Europe's largest 40Gb/s Networking demonstration.

Mellanox can present the highest utilisation with 40Gb/s Infiniband, the highest performance/utilisation connectivity for HPC simulations, the highest visualization for scientific applications, real-time and advanced remote desktop over Infiniband, advanced technology for high-performance Cloud connectivity, and accelerated connectivity by 40 Gb/s end-to-end Mellanox InfiniBand solutions and leading GPU vendors.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Sterling from Louisiana State University announced the Year 1, the first year after petaflops with 2 major challenges. At present we face 100.000 cores and more and the majority of the machines are now quad-core. This is also the second generation of multi-core.

Prof. Dr. Meuer stated that attendees for ISC'09 on Friday, June 19 were 1422 from 44 countries. Taking into account the on-line registrations the number rises to 1527 and by the end of the conference, there will be significantly more than 1600 participants.

Russia, Middle East and Asia are being represented very well. New countries are Thailand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Malta and Algeria. And Russia ends before Japan in terms of attendees. One fifth of attendants are senior representatives from business, 6% are students.

ISC'09 will present four keynotes and there will be in depth sessions on Clouds, Aerospace, and Climate Modelling.

As for the TOP500 highlights, Roadrunner is still number one. Juelich is represented with two systems in Top10 and Intel has 87,7% quad-core based systems. No Cloud systems as yet in the TOP500, Prof. Dr. Meuer stated, since they will not run Linpack.

Thomas Sterling told the audience that there is no exascale computer technology available yet. To achieve this, there is a great need of global system support.