Sanhu Li @ SC18

November 19, 2018

It’s my first time attending SC, it’s a wonderful experience!

We worked together to set up our lovely booth. It’s great to see all the posters hanging on the wall!

building the booth

Diego, Jose, and Xu are bringing cool stuff to the booth, the DEMAC cluster! It has arm cores and FPGAs on it. There are 24 such boards on the 3-D printed shelf! DEMAC Cluster

The exhibitions are also really great! We see many big companies showing off their novel techniques! Our exhibition booth is facing D-WAVE, the quantum computing company! They have great talks about their quantum annealing computers, and we can write code in python to use the computers remotely! They are offering free access to their computers with limited number of calls, but definitely worth trying it! DWAVE Booth

They are competing with IBM Q computer, which is also presented in the exhibition! This is the real quantum computer which could operate in room temperature in the top and absolute 0 degree in the bottom, that’s “cool”!

IBM-Q

First time heard about RAPIDS, the NVIDIA framework to share data across programs in GPU without returning to the host! It’s built on Apache Arrow. Apache Narrow

AWS is offering magic liquid on their desk. I’m too afraid to give it a try, but it’s colorful! AWS drinks

Learned about meltdown and spectre from RedHat! The presenter did a good job making it easy to understand! While it’s sad to know we have to accept there’s trade-off between security and performance, especially when that’s a lot of performance, for a person in HPC. NetSpectre is scary! NetSpectre at RedHat

The conference also has a lot of great papers! It’s sad that I don’t have too much time joining many paper sessions, but I truly enjoy them! I like the iSpan algorithm which could fast identify strongly connected components (SCC) in a graph! iSpan

It’s good to know HPC and machine learning are super useful in bioinformatics! bio

Josh did a great job to win the 2nd prize in student poster! Congrats Josh! Damn, I shouldn’t have forgotten to take more pictures for him!

Josh Davis

Of course, there are also exciting receptions! The opening gala reception and Dell reception are in different day but in the same place, Gilley’s Dallas! Fake cowboy on real cow! Cowboy

The pangolins are also really cute, while I don’t know whether they are pangolins, but they are cute! Pangolins

It’s a great SC18, having fun, having knowledge!