From the last post, you can read some of what I did see and hear. This is about what was missing. Applications: The folks from Microsoft showed off excel running on a cluster. Some of the others showed “trivial” or booth-specific applications. These weren’t real things in most cases, they were smaller “toy” apps or models. Maybe I missed it, but I did not see many applications that demanded supercomputing.

Well, SC06 is now history. Reno is the next venue. Maybe we will have a bit of a booth then. So what happened, what was extraordinary, what was ordinary? This is kind of hard. Last year, there was so much cool stuff, this year, well, somewhat less cool stuff. The exhibit did not seem as big this year, or as lively. Looked like lots of vendors talking to each other. I had a distinct sense that this was a high tech equivalent of a red light district … Ok… lets be more focused.

Ok, been promising to post this, so I am going to break it up into chunks. I will report on what I saw, what I didn’t see, and what I wanted to see. Will break each of these up into posts on its own for better manageability.

These thoughts are randomly coursing through my mind as I sit here waiting on the support number for HP. I purchased an HP laptop for business use about 2 years ago, and it has had a few problems. It’s a great unit: AMD64, 1 GB ram, big disk, nVidia graphics. Would love to get something like this again when I buy the next one in about 6-9 months. Most recent issues have been with the lid and the USB ports.

Cray and IBM. Congratulations to them. HPCS is about making supercomputers more productive for end users. How to leverage tremendous efficiencies, build better languages for faster, better, more accurate development. I was very impressed with Chapel. IBM’s looked like a Java derivative, as verbose and opaque as Java usually is (it is often hard to discern what Java is doing from Java source). Regardless of this, now we can see where this will go.

Ok, this has been bouncing around in my head for a while now. Been trying to work up something to really describe it correctly in terms of a mathematical model. I have an idea, but too little time to work on it. Here is the hypothesis. Information technologies gradually evolve to a point where their performance is fundamentally limited by their interconnection bandwidth. Recent examples of this are multicore chips. No matter how much bandwidth you throw at something, if you hold that bandwidth, that fixed resource constant, and simply increase the number of cycles available, or if you prefer, the “size” of the resource, then at some point in time you will approach a point where the of resource contention will dominate, and you have to actively work to hide communication behind calculation.

The folks at /. have linked to an open letter to the OSS community from Novell. This impacts HPC in that much of HPC is done on Linux, a large and growing fraction if you look at Top500 and other measures. Here is why I thought it was a good thing. Yes. Exactly. Companies … no … customers want interoperability. Moreover, they don’t really like it when their suppliers start suing each other, or them.

Ok, so color me amused. I knew that it would not take long, and sure enough, the **“independent **bloggers” doing marketing for various organizations have fired their second shot. The first one is the “Linux is too hard” meme that seems to have died the quiet death it deserved. This next one is unfortunately as laughable as it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of something critical. This meme could be called “Open Source is Dangerous”.

I haven’t had a chance to do more posts or a wrap up of SC06. I will do this soon. I want to briefly point out this article. And offer a mea culpa. Briefly, I had a discussion with Patrick of the Microsoft team about Microsoft’s goals and vision. You know, if you just remove the CEO’s occasional statements about his competitor being a virus, a cancer, and so on, the vision isn’t bad, and is something that we can work with.

Here.