Supercomputing 2011

I just got back from Supercomputing conference 2011 in Seattle Washington.  It was a pretty good trip - we demo-ed a 100 Gbps network, had a few talks, and everything went pretty smoothly, more or less.

Just to give some idea of the demo's network speed, consider this:

     My current internet connection is roughly 30 Mbps max - that's fairly fast for home internet service (speedtest services tell me it's better than about 90% of the world's internet speeds).  That lets me download a CD's worth of data in just a few minutes, just tens of minutes for a DVD.  That's thousands of times faster than dialup, for comparison.
     My home network is much faster than my internet connection.  It can transfer a (theoretical) maximum of 1 Gbps - that's a DVD's worth of information in a few seconds (turning minutes into seconds is a significant difference - imagine holding your breath 10 seconds, and imagine holding it 10 minutes).  In reality, the hard drive on my computer access data far, far slower than that because I have older hardware and am not using an SSD drive, and data has to be transferred across the system bus on the motherboard and stuff like that.  My computer can't really 'saturate' the network with data.
      Anyway, we had a network connection at Supercomputing of 10 Gbps - that's 10x faster than my home network.  That's a blueray disc in a few seconds, a DVD in less than a second.  Below, we used this connection to model the expansion of the universe several millions of years after the big bang using data fed over the internet connection.  The top screen showed us the relative amount of data available over the 10 Gbps connection, and below that, we did the same thing, but used a 100 Gbps connection.  Yes, the 10 Gbps connection was the 'slow' connection.  I don't really have anything else to compare a 100 Gbps connection to.

You can see from my phone's camera - the bottom screen is getting data at about 93 Gbps, which is really close to the theoretical maximum the connection can handle.    The screens are not very clear from my phone, but the amount of 'data' on the bottom screen and the top screen is visible, anyway.

There were lots of vendors there.  Intel, of course, was showing off their stuff:

They hosted a flight sim in 3D with '3D' motion:

I don't know why, but Microsoft was present as well (and they actually had a very large booth).  Oh yeah, also, I guess Kinect is finally coming to Windows:

I stopped by Supermicro, gawked at their AMD servers (64 cores in a node), chatted with IBM and their Watson:

Our booth was next to NASA, AMD, HP, and there were hundreds of other vendors, manufacturers, universities, institutions, and other groups being represented at the conference I was able to chat with, like nVidia, Penguin Computing, DataDirect, SGI, CRAY, and so forth.  It was quite useful to go and make some contacts with them.  I got a little bag of swag from all of the booths as well, flash drives, led lights/fiber channel testers, t-shirts and pens, and some useful computing goodies.

There were also a few competitions, for giving away some more valuable goodies, such as a few iPad 2 giveaways (for sitting through some marketing presentations).  Best of all though, was a Samsung Galaxy tablet (android) giveaway, which was being sponsored by PRACE (http://www.prace-project.eu/).  You just had to visit some of their partners booths, and be present to win (instead of going to the other giveaways).  And guess what?

I WON THE GALAXY TAB!  Hahaha!