We were very happy to again welcome Rich Brueckner of insideHPC at the Swiss hpc-ch booth at SC11 after his recent visit at ISC11. We had the discussion shortly before the end of the exhibit. This gave us the opportunity to relax a little bit after three very intensive exhibition days and to have a more philosophical approach to supercomputing and life in general.
We started by discussing the similarities between supercomputers (clusters) and his Java motorcycle he was exposing at his booth (yes, there are similarities). Rich told us about some highlights of the conference like the interactive Earth displayed at the NOAA booth. The discussion then continued to what makes HPC so interesting for us: Are these the latest GPU models or the applications of supercomputing to better understand the world?
Finally we closed the discussion looking at the HPC initiatives in Switzerland (CSCS has been the first center deploying a Cray XK6). Finally we said goodbye until March 2012 in Lugano at the HPC Advisory Workshop.
