SC Keynote. Record attendance, Dell Sales pitch, Vector computing is back

Once again, Gregg has done a great job over at Mental Burdocks. I do have to say, I'd have to rank Michael Dell's keynote below some recent keynote speakers: Bill Gates in Seattle 2005, Ray Kurzweil in Tampa 2006, and Neil Gershenfeld in Reno 2007. It felt a bit like a Dell sales pitch - most of Dell's personal innovation has been in the Dell business model and not the technology. I am typing this after the fact, so I won't try to compete with Gregg's live account of the keynote.

Michale mentioned that all of the advances in graphics processors for game consoles and high-end gaming video cards are beginning to have an impact in high performance computing. I had started to get excited about this, and had attended GPU programming sessions at previous SC conferences, but now it seems like this is really ready to take off. There is now a good developer ecosystem around this, and NVIDIA is actively engaging the community and developing products specific to HPC. Now it is possible to use libraries and frameworks that have already been developed to take advantage of these massively parallel processors. Higher level programming and hardware abstraction is helping to accelerate the adoption. Vector computing is back!

I would like to note that although there is record attendance this year, it actually seems less chaotic than other years I have attended. In Seattle when I was waiting for the show floor to open for the Gala I felt like I was in line to see Pearl Jam. The line was huge, and when I did get to the show floor the food and drink stations were mobbed by hoards of locust-like geeks. This year, like Reno (I don't remember how smoothly things went at Tampa...), things were much calmer. I didn't wait in line, and there was plenty of food and beverages to go around - it was not difficult to find food and beverage stations with little or no line, especially after the initial rush into the show.