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The formal proceedings of the International Supercomputing Conference 2018 ended yesterday, and today I'll be attending the HPC IO workshop which dovetails with the official program. Whilst I will be giving a more complete 'blog review, a summary can be provided. ISC itself contained quite a few highlights, not the least being record attendance with over 3500 people registered. As usual, there was the bi-annual announcement of the Top500 list, with the US taking the number one spot with Summitt for the first time in several years. There also is a curious increase in duplicate and anonymous submissions which is strictly within the rules but does distort things somewhat. Ultimately of course measuring systems solely on floating point operations is not the best metric.
Unlike last year I spent less time attending the formal program, and more time in discussion with various vendors, mainly for matters of system expansion, filesystems (BeeGFS is a particular favourite, and networking technologies. My own contribution to the conference was via the proposed International HPC Certification programme with both a poster presentation, and the first face-to-face meeting of the group. The latter was quite an enthusiastic gathering, and I did note a much better gender balance than other components in the indusry. One presentation I did attend of note was the final session with Thomas Sterling giving his usual hilarious and insightful presentation on events in the previous year and predictions for what is upcoming. I had a brief chat with him afterwards and took the opportunity to get him to sign one of my copies of his classic book, How to Build a Beowulf.
Unlike last year I spent less time attending the formal program, and more time in discussion with various vendors, mainly for matters of system expansion, filesystems (BeeGFS is a particular favourite, and networking technologies. My own contribution to the conference was via the proposed International HPC Certification programme with both a poster presentation, and the first face-to-face meeting of the group. The latter was quite an enthusiastic gathering, and I did note a much better gender balance than other components in the indusry. One presentation I did attend of note was the final session with Thomas Sterling giving his usual hilarious and insightful presentation on events in the previous year and predictions for what is upcoming. I had a brief chat with him afterwards and took the opportunity to get him to sign one of my copies of his classic book, How to Build a Beowulf.
