My adventure of attending the 5-day conference started with “Looks like we have a little bumpiness ahead. Please return to your seat and buckle up” when I took a plane from Heathrow, London.
This year, ISC registered 3007 attendees and 137 exhibitors. Definitely, it is one of the most successful worldwide HPC conferences in the past two decades. And, although I am well aware of the agenda and the structure of the event (because I have attended before), it was still like a box chocolate every single moment.
The HPC world-class conference
I would like to share my personal experience and what this HPC conference means to me:
- The keynote speakers are in charge of projects that are truly transforming the future of mankind. In my experience, all of them have been approachable to exchange opinions, extremely kind and brilliantly funny. You can only imagine how impressed I was when Prof. Thomas Sterling “the father of HPC” remembered exactly all our conversations we had almost 7 years ago. I was really honoured to talk to him again.
- You can definitely get hold of the newest technologies if you are thinking of implementing HPC in your company. In exhibitor space, the stalls had both technical specialists and commercial staff to enlighten and support you.
- If you are in the academia, you have the chance to talk with the top researchers of HPC while they are presenting their posters or making their presentations.
- The HPC ecosystem is covered by workshops run by teams from the most renowned HPC institutions such as OpenMP, MPI, CUDA/GPU, Amazon and many others. They were really engaged and I literally felt how my brain was being stimulated.
- Every single detail in the conference was neat and carefully detailed: the registration, the website, the catering, the internet connection, audio, video, photos. It was an A1 event.
We are the champions
One of the most exciting moments of the event is the announcement of the top1 supercomputer in the world. Frontier is the winner this year. It uses AMD hardware infrastructure. Although it is the most powerful supercomputer today, the problems of the present and future need better infrastructure. To this end, Intel is developing Aurora.
In my eyes, a really great way to start in the world of HPC is to set up your own supercomputer and the Student Cluster Competition gives you that opportunity. This year, none of the Chinese teams attended the event in person, but they were still victorious online! They are usually the winners at this competition. I was very pleased to see that my favourite teams were on the stage! The team of my university – the University of Edinburgh! The Spanish team stood out because of their team spirit, and of course, the winners from the University of Heidelberg.
It so happens that guys from Heidelberg helped me with my luggage at the train station when I arrived in Hamburg. When we later bumped into each other during a coffee break, they told me that they have been taking part in the competition for 5 years. Call me a clairvoyant but I told them they were going to win this year. And they did.
Congratulations again to the team Heidelbears from the University of Heidelberg
Marvellous members of the HPC community
What a list of notable HPC people from different organizations around the world! The roller-coaster feeling I experienced throughout the event was definitely due to the interaction with the people I met after COVID years in person. Meeting them was a real birthday present to me. Thanks for the selfies to Jack from Nvidia, Ben from the Uni of Edinburgh, Toby from Intel, Mateo from BSC, Laura from Washington DC uni, Prof. Jack from Tennessee, Prof. Satochi from RIKEN, Richard of PETSc, Hartwig, Ieva, Bastian and Oleg from the math session, and Prof. Sterling from Indiana University.
Thanks for the kind attitude to have my HPC selfies at ISC 2022.
New talents
As the HPC community needs to pass on the knowledge to keep growing, I was so glad to meet new and young talent in the HPC field. Thanks to all for the chats, lunch times, cocktails times, debugging ideas, and for the new gifts received at the conference. Innovative ideas are the best gifts ever!
I was so curious about their work in the field of HPC and why they came to ISC 2022. It was very impressive to hear about the new libraries they are developing using parallel algorithms.
Promoting the Women participation in HPC-Science
I can tell that I was able to picture almost all the women attendees in the event. These extraordinary women had to work hard to be exposed in the event. Some of them were speakers, poster presenters, and volunteers in the ISC organization. Glad to see how their institutions promoted their HPC career progression.
The Women in HPC (WHPC) had a space to discuss the challenge women face in HPC field every day because HPC teams are mostly male-dominated.
I think that the message was that being in the right place helps to find inner peace, happiness, and then you can grow. Thanks again to this group since 2016.
My ISC mentor
Having a top A1 event recognized around the HPC world demanded several years of assiduous work. Ms. Nages Sieslack, the ISC Marketing Communications has been demonstrated dedication and love for her job. She is truly an inspirational mentor. She actively rose me to the top-class HPC universe, since I was a teacher in Peru at UNI, she kindly respected my dreams about developing HPC tech in Peru, and my willingness to spread the HPC word around the world.
An immense appreciation to Nages.
Sólo para Mí! 