·
·
1 min read

More from the floor of SC’05

Gates’ keynote from Supercomputing 2005 went well based on our un-scientific polls on the show floor.  By well I mean this pro-Linux and non-MS crowd said he hit on good points re: HPC, was interesting and showed good demos. The following comment — from a Beltway national labs guy who runs an all Unix/Linux lab — is a good example:

“I had forgotten that Bill Gates was scheduled to give the keynote address at the conference. He just spoke and gave a very nice and interesting presentation about future directions for high performance computing. Not too much MS sales talk, and said a lot of the right things about interoperability and so on. He’s quite a good speaker. Anyway, I have to give him credit for not pissing me off, and even being interesting and reasonable.”

Here are a couple others viewpoints Dan Reed from Renaissance Computing Institute; Walter Stewart an independent consultant. And at the show we managed to meet with Ken Farmer, who runs a number of sites included WindowsHPC. In his words:

a website for System Administrators, developers, and enterprise managers, offering recent industry news, events, mailing lists and links, etc. related to high performance technical computing and clustering with Windows.

Beta 2 of the product also went live. I snapped a shot of the admin “to do list” – just one of the tools to manage the cluster. And along the lines of servers, Ciarra’s are very cool. Four blades in one relatively portable chassis.

Lastly, I’m still waiting on photos of Sheryl Crow’s concert from Tuesday’s party at EMP. Lance was in the house, but no photos of him. A major highlight (besides from the Red Hook) was access to the Sci-Fi Museum, which is connected to EMP. The exhibits on display include Star Wars, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Cylon Commanders from the orginal Battlestar and much more.

Patrick