By Jake Carroll, Queensland Brain Institute, UQ
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC15) is the only event in the technology calendar that is academic and research focused, whilst simultaneously providing unparalleled industry engagement, analysis, collaboration, development and operational tracks, all revolving around high performance computing.
Thanks to UQ and RCC, I was given the opportunity to attend SC15 in Austin, Texas, and fully engage with the international HPC community. I watched seminars on topics as varied as best practices in procurement of high performance computers through to micro benchmarking and exploitation of the internal architectural peculiarities of the Intel Xeon E5v3 processor.
Industry engagement was extremely productive for myself, and thus UQ, with IBM, Dell, DDN, nVidia, Cray and others all providing significant and dedicated time to discuss upcoming technologies, UQ’s own deployment goals and even potential collaborations to further technological advancement in storage and compute infrastructure to enable research outcomes at UQ.
The opportunities were plentiful and profound, and I came away with some strong direction, shared vision for the future of HPC storage and file system design and some important industry links to support UQ’s strategic goals in data management and research enablement via the use of supercomputing.
SC15 has proven to be an absolutely invaluable experience. It was great to see major local storage and compute initiatives within the RCC, and UQ’s research institutes and faculties, aligning with many of the discussions and development sessions that were held in Austin. It has given me confidence in UQ’s direction for future research computing at scale and validated theory, turning it into practice.
Onward, to SC16 in Salt Lake City, Utah!
