Democratization of Supercomputing

Last week SUSE played the T.R.U.M.P. card in Washington D.C. as Thomas and Ralf Unveiled Many Products during an incredible SUSECON that saw our first acquisition (welcome aboard openATTIC!) alongside countless releases from SLES on Raspbery Pi to Containers-as-a-Service Platform – so obviously we would kick back and relax this week. Well not so, because we’re here celebrating a new democracy here in Salt Lake City! We call this special session into order as we explore how software-defined infrastructure, cloud, and embedded solutions are bringing new HPC capabilities to the mainstream.

Supercomputing, for many people, is a world where science fiction turns into reality. At an event like SC16, some of the smartest minds across technology and research are brought together to explore the solutions and methods they’re using to tackle product innovation, analytical challenges, and unanswered questions across industries as diverse as medicine to space exploration. For me, and one of the reasons I’m incredibly excited about attending this year however, is talking to other first time attendees and seeing how the power of the supercomputer is reaching new groups of people who may not have previously had access to the resources and technical capabilities that we’re starting to see flow downstream and outside of the top supercomputing centers.

The exhibit floor features a number of key SUSE partners that are taking part in this new approach to HPC including Microsoft (Booth #1501) and Google (#4272) Amazon Web Services and many of them also key members of the OpenHPC (#643) community such as Lenovo (#2643), Intel (#1819), and ARM (#4033). Additionally the rest of the week features some great looking sessions around new ways of creating, delivering, and consuming supercomputing en masse.

For those attending and wanting to learn more about OpenHPC initatives, cloud, and other stuff I think is cool add these to your calendar:

• Transient Guarantees: Maximizing the Value of Idle Cloud Capacity | Thursday, November 17^th, 3:30 – 4pm – Read More
• Intel® HPC Orchestrator, a System Software Stack Providing Key Building Blocks of Intel® Scalable System Framework | Wednesday, November 16^th, 4:30 – 5pm – Read More
• Experimental Infrastructure and Methodology for HPC Cloud Research (Birds of a Feather session) | Tuesday, November 15^th, 5:15 – 7pm – Read More

…really the session list is exhaustive there’s so much happening the rest of the week we had NASA’s own Advanced Computing Branch Chief, William H. Thigpen, discussing the now and the future of supercomputing at NASA Ames Research Center and many more excellent sessions still planned. Be sure to read David Byte’s blog to get a full overview of the incredible sessions scheduled at SUSE Booth #4427 this week and see you there!