SC|04 Day One

5:30 pm EST
Sitting at 30,000 feet on my way to Pittsburgh writing this. Tonight is the first night of the SC04 conference, and seven of us from UTD are headed there as part of a reconnaissance force. The school has a lot of research money from TI (as part of that $300 million deal), and there's an effort to spend part of that money on starting a high performance computing (HPC) center at UTD. Our jobs is to take a look at what's out there and to pick the brains of those in the business - in other words, get an idea what's needed to get this project off the ground.

11:00 pm EST
Just got off the floor and the opening ceremony. So far, it appears to be one big trade show, though most of the interesting presentations don't start for a few days. The expected big players are here (IBM, Hitachi, NEC, SGI, Cray, various government labs (Fermi, LANL, etc.), and universities), and the products seem really cool. I'll probably spend more time on the floor over the next few days getting more details (when I'm not touring Pittsburgh). Interestingly, Dell and Microsoft were also on the floor. MS I can see since they've announced their HPC initiative, though I'm skeptical whether they can get it right for a long time. Dell I really can't understand; given the amount of grief the 6650s at work have given me, I really can't see how they could even consider themselves a viable contender in this field. Then again, maybe they'll do something right and surprise me (but I really doubt it). In any case, security at the convention center is getting a bit antsy about the five college kids hanging around late at night so I'll post more tomorrow. (Oh, and it's really nice for the university to pay for us to stay at the Westin until Friday...even if the hotel did screw up and only gave us one room for seven people.)