Is there a word for being simultaneously exhausted and re-invigorated at the same time? If not there should be.
It’s how I feel every year following the annual Supercomputing Conference – the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis – this year aptly named SC15.
For those of us from the Ohio Supercomputer Center, AweSim and the Ohio Technology Consortium headed to Austin, Texas this coming week for SC15, we’re all in the same boat. On one hand, this is the Super Bowl to those of us around the world who live, eat and breathe high performance computing. It’s the greatest opportunity for all of us to immerse ourselves in a sea of our peers, collaborators and vendors with the opportunity to tell our story while learning more about what others are doing.
On the other hand, trying to soak in the wealth of opportunities this week presents is an endurance challenge. For instance, my calendar is already filled with 33 meetings in just four days – Tuesday alone I’m looking at 10 hours of meetings. And I’m just one member of the OSC team.
But I’m not complaining. That jam-packed calendar is something I look forward to most of the year. Of course, it’s not easy to take in the sheer depth and breadth of this conference if you haven’t been there. So take a look at just a few numbers that illustrate what SC15 is all about:
- 10,000+ The number of attendees from around the world, with more than 83 percent of those attendees traveling over 500 miles for the conference.
- 300+ The number of exhibitors from the research and industry communities who will pack the 140,000-square foot exhibit hall floor of the Austin Convention Center. Those exhibitors’ booths will feature the latest technologies and discoveries from industrial and research organizations around the world.
- 1,600 Of course, if you’re at SC15 you’ll want to check out the 40-foot by 40-foot – or 1,600-square foot – OSC booth (No. 1209 on the floor map), which is located directly in front of a main entrance.
- 80+ SCinet, which provides the HPC capabilities for the conference, will install over 80 miles of network cables and fiber. SCinet’s wireless, meanwhile, will serve more than 4,000 simultaneous clients during the conference.
- 1+ The show floor will have over 1 Terabit per second bandwidth capacity available thanks to SCinet.
- 12+ From Sunday through Thursday, each 12-plus hour day of the SC15 schedule is full of talks, tutorials, awards presentations, workshops, competitions, exhibits, job fairs and networking opportunities.
So hopefully those numbers illustrate that while I may return to Ohio with dark rings under my eyes and in need of a good nap, I’ll also be super-charged and ready to dive into the coming year. And it’s important to be ready to roll because our plan is to reach out and engage as many people, companies and entities as we can to raise awareness of who we are and what we’re capable of: And that’s propelling innovation, discovery and economic competitiveness.
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