Staff from the Scientific Computing Department and the Hartree Centre were in Salt Lake City in November for the world’s largest supercomputing conference to showcase STFC’s world class science

​With the efforts of Nick Hill and Damian Jones the new design rose from a blank 20x20 ft space to a SCD and Hartree Centre booth in just under 2 days. This was longer than expected as the vinyl graphics had shrunk in transport!

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The team in total had eight slots on the programme at this annual event, ranging from training others to use new High Performance Computing systems, to delivering papers on results.

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​One of the items on the stand that attracted particular attention was a node from the brand new Asian Cat computer which was launched at the start of the conference.

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​Alison Kennedy, Director of the Hartree Centre ​was a panellist on a 'Birds of a Feather' session: 'European Exascale Projects and Their International Collaboration Potential'. ​

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​Key themes of the conference were 'cognitive computing', the topic of the keynote speech, as well as energy efficient computing and women in HPC . This year at the opening media lunch it was announced that 25 percent of attendees of the conference were women - the result of a concerted effort to diversify the workforce in the field of HPC. 

John Baker, Neil Morgan and Milos Puzovic all delivered sessions on energy efficient computing.

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​The booth was busy at times as we explained to visitors the world class science that STFC supports and the expertise needed to analyse experimental data and perform simulations enabling scientists to maximise their scientific insight. Visitors also liked the STFC brains as who couldn't do with an additional brain now and then!

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Sergi Siso gave a tutorial teaching students and professionals which tools can help them to use modern High Performance Computing systems. The conference hosted 270 students in total this year.

Robin Pinning delivered a session in Data Centric Cognitive Computing at the Hartree Centre – A Model for Collaboration to Drive Economic Impact.

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​​Colin Morey was on the panel for a session called 'HPC File Systems, Challenges, and Use Cases' and also gave a session at the LSF user group.

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​​At the conference, details of ULTRA, a new platform that enables scientists to interactive with tomographic reconstructions within tens of minutes of data collection at a resolution not achievable before was unveiled by Erica Yang. ​

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​More details about the conference can also be found in Stephen Longshaw's blog: http://www.micronanoflows.ac.uk/people/dr-stephen-m-longshaw

A big thank you to everybody who took part in making SC16 a success!

We're already planning for SC17 Denver http://sc17.supercomputing.org/.with with key themes of High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

Hopefully we'll see you there!