Austin (TX) - Michael Dell will present a welcoming session and keynote presentation today in Ballroom D at the Supercomputing Conference 2008 in Austin. Dell kicks off the busiest day of the conference, complete with more than 70 separate presentations and running until 7pm CST this evening.


Included in the event is an exhibit hall with over 300 presenters, educational classes on every subject relating to parallel and supercomputing. Also, several technical paper discussions are scheduled, some challenges, commercial presentations, discussions about supercomputing jobs and how industries are shaped by supercomputing, open source software support, hardware design, current and future software concepts, communications fabrics, interconnects and much more.

The event will run all week with additional presentations by industry experts from major companies and universities including Purdue and UC-Berkeley. A final wrap-up session on Friday begins discussions beyond Petascale computing, into Exascale and Yottascale.

Yesterday, Convey Computer issued a stunning press release demonstrating a new form of hybrid computer. They worked with Intel to develop a custom engineered co-processor which runs alongside an Intel Xeon, executing the same instruction stream in the same physical and virtual memory space - just like the way the old 8087/80287/80387 FPUs used to operate along side the 8086, 80286 and 80386 CPUs.

Well, the SC08 conference - @author response

Nov 19, 2008 05:08     

...just destroyed it's credibility with me. Michael Dell has about as much to do with the business of supercomputing as Mattel's matchbox cars toy line has to do with development at Chevrolet. Hilarious. [Dell PowerEdge computers occupy 19 of the top 500 supercomputer slots in the world, as was published in November, 2008, holding 10% of the top 100 positions. I think Dell is on track in the supercomputing world, and I'm sure Michael Dell was given prepared copy to more or less read by the experts working at Dell. Also, Dell's net income is about $2 billion annually, roughly 1/4th that of Intel's on $61B in sales (which is about 40% more than Intel). They are not a small company, nor a force not to be reckoned with. -Rick]

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Allow me to rephrase.

Nov 19, 2008 14:27     

I could create a cluster out of wii consoles, even one that could list on the supercomputer500 (not that I am advocating this) Does this make Satoru Iwata a valid keynote speaker at that conference? Micheal Dell and his company, for the most part, merely assemble and sell things developed by others. When they do design things, it's typically with the idea of both lowering build costs and raising service costs for it's customers. Really, they innovate nothing (IMHO), and least of all the space of supercomputing. He does make lots of money tho Rick, I'll agree with you there. Maybe that's why he is speaking? Certainly it's not because his company is changing the world.

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