Last week in Seattle a record attendance of more than 11,000 people from throughout the world met at the Seattle Convention Center for SC11 — the largest international supercomputing conference focusing on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis through a large industrial and research exhibition and a highly peer reviewed technical program (which was attended by almost 5,000 people this year).

The conference keynote presentation was given by Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA^®.

Huang highlighted challenges in large-scale computational, in particular power, programmability, and scalability and how these challenges pertain to developers, scientists, and the computing industry. Huang stated that the “holy grail of workstations, to not just visualize and model, but to be able to simulate while you visualize and model, coupling simulation and design into a cohesive environment has been something we have been striving for a very long time.”  Huang introduced the Maximus™ technology “that integrates and unifies visualization and computation into one platform, we have essentially put a supercomputer inside the workstation.”

In addition to the SC 11 technical papers, there were a number of interesting co-located workshops: 4th Workshop on High Performance Computational Finance, 6th Parallel Data Storage Workshop, 2nd Workshop on Petascale Data Analytics and the 2011 Workshop on Ultrascale Visualization, just to name a few.

I am happy to note that the next SC conference will take place in Salt Lake City, November 10-16. You can get a preview of the conference next year at the SC12 website. See if you notice anything different regarding the beer I am drinking in the video ;).

(Contributed by Chris Johnson, University of Utah)