SC07-part II, III and so on

SC07 is in full swing...Hot keywords: Multi-core, Cell, FPGA in no particular order. On Monday (11/12), I attended the FPGA tutorial: pretty elementary stuff. But I had a chance to see what the industry and the HPC community was interested in general. I think the most entertaining piece was getting to know the current and future trends in computing. This gives a new perspective to my research and I am able to evaluate my research in comparison to where the industry is heading. Monday evening: The exhibit floors open finally..lots of companies are throwing away prizes, notably Intel throwing 45prizes in 45 minutes to celebrate their 45nm release. I tried a lot but the "unlucky" me did not win any of the prizes. I almost forgot to have dinner as I was so busy checking out the prize quotients of the booths. I rated the booths giving out Apple products a PQ of 5 and above. Anyways a fun-filled evening with two free extra large drinks on the house..!!!
Tuesday(11/13): I managed to meet with someone from AMD, Inc.(FPGA, MD), GiDEL, a senior researcher from IBM, etc. I attended a couple of sessions as part of my student volunteer duties. I had an opportunity to talk to Brian from FPGA.com on "Precision analysis requirements for FPGA applications". He was stressing on the need for a standard to adhere to while developing applications and implementing them on FPGAs. There's no need for sticking to double precision when you can get away with single precision. In the evening, it was time to attend vintage car show as part of the SGI 25th anniversary celebrations (check the pic). I admire SGI for pulling its socks after filing for bankruptcy two years back. It has become a formidable company after concentrating on its core competencies such as the shared memory model machines (and yes..FPGA based computing). The SGI event included free dinner and drinks as part of the party. great event in general...!!!
Wednesday(11/14): I attended a PVFS(Parallel Virtual File Systems) session and then a BE(Broader Engagement) panel about "How to keep a job in the Computing industry?". Both the sessions were eye-opening and interesting. That evening all of us headed out to a Thai place for dinner.
Thursday(11/15): Apparently the last day of the conference saw a lot of activity. I had to attend a session as a student volunteer plus attended a meeting with SGI ppl at 1 pm. In the end, Rajesh, Hari, Ganesh and myself roamed arnd taking pics with the NEC supercomputer node (>1.6TFlops), Cray nodes, etc. We started packing up our VT booth by 4pm. We finished that by 7pm and then headed out to an Indian place for dinner.
Friday(11/16): The place is deserted, the net's down and a spectacular week has come to an end at Reno.