GridCentric SC09 Wrap-up

We spent last week in beautiful Portland, Oregon for the SC 2009 International Conference on HPC, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. In between visits to various brewpubs and our gastronomic home base, we managed to get the following done:

• Hung out at the Compute Canada booth with Mike Bauer, John Morton and others from SHARCNET, Susan Baldwin from Compute Canada, as well as Cameron Kiddle from the U of Calgary / WestGrid (who showed us a cool demo of GeoChronos) at the Monday night Opening Gala.
  
• Attended the IBM Customer Reception, where we had beers with Neil Bunn (IBM), Jill Kowalchuk (Cybera), Florent Parent (Clumeq), and many others (thanks to Neil for the invite!).
• Went to the SGI Innovators Breakfast where we met with Paul Lu (U of Alberta) and talked about the GridCentric platform's technological underpinnings (thanks to Daniel St-Germain for the invite!). This was one of the few alcohol-free events we attended.
• Spoke with Josh Simons (Sun) about the convergence of HPC and Enterprise technologies. You should read his blog, especially his HPC writings.
• Showed our demo to Daniel Chavarría from PNNL, who gave us helpful feedback and words of encouragement.
  
• Spoke with folks from Mellanox, QLogic, and Myricom about hardware support for virtualization in their Infiniband and 10GigE adapters. Turns out they've supported it for years.
• Spoke at length with Gregor von Laszewski about the NSF FutureGrid project, which will act as a testbed for HPC grid/cloud platforms and software stacks - perfect for evaluating the GridCentric platform and getting ourselves on the U.S. government's radar.
  
• Had beers with Daniel Gruner (SciNet) at the Thursday Closing Event (which was quite nice!), then went on to have more beers with Danny at another pub whose name escapes me (although I recall it had over 100 beers on tap).

Overall, it was an exhausting week (bookended by some atrocious connector flights), but we made a lot of friends and are much the wiser. We're really looking forward to SC10!