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SC10, the 23^rd annual conference in this series, will take place from November 13–19, 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The conference anticipates more than 11,000 attendees from industry, academia and government. The SC Technical Program has emerged as the premiere place to discuss and demonstrate emerging techniques and innovative applications in high-performance computing. SC10 will offer a broad spectrum of technical presentations and discussions, including rigorously peer‐reviewed papers, panels, tutorials, workshops and posters that showcase the latest findings from laboratories and research institutions around the world.

“We are very excited about the quality of material that will be presented during this year’s Technical Program,” said Ricky Kendall, Scientific Computing Group Leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and SC10 Technical Program Chair. “We hope that our multiple venues that present important areas of HPC work and research will give SC10 participants a variety of content to review, consider and discuss during the conference.”

For example, the SC10 Technical Papers Committee received 253 submissions, conducted 1,009 reviews, and participated in several days of committee meetings to accept 51 papers that will be presented during this year’s Technical Program.

Each year, the SC Technical Program highlights specific areas. For SC10, the technological thrust areas that will be featured prominently are climate simulation, heterogeneous computing and data‐intensive computing.

The climate simulation area will highlight the importance of HPC-based research to help scientists understand global warming, climate change and other environmental processes.

“The topic of climate has never been more relevant to a meeting like SC10, given the growing importance of simulation to addressing climate change questions from policy makers and stakeholders” said James Hack, National Center for Computational Sciences director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the SC10 climate simulation thrust co-chair. “HPC will become an even more critical resource to help the broader research community to develop solutions to potential environmental impacts.”

“This topic is particularly relevant to SC10, in view of recent extreme weather events, such as the very mild winter in Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics while Washington, D.C. experienced the heaviest snowfall in history,” said William Sawyer, HPC Application analyst at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, and the SC10 climate simulation thrust area co-chair. “HPC is a critical resource to help the broader research community understand these and other weather events, develop solutions to current climate issues, and help minimize the environmental impact of future events."

The heterogeneous computing thrust area will examine the technological and research advances in software scientists will need to use accelerator‐based computing, which is now occurring on large‐scale machines and could propel supercomputing to the exascale level.

“When we get to exascale computing, these machines will be running up to a million trillion calculations per second, and the supercomputing architectures we have now are not sufficient to support that,” said Robert D. Adolf, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory research scientist and the SC10 heterogeneous computing thrust area chair. “It’s important that as we advance toward exascale, we get people from research and industry together to discuss the tools and applications we must develop so we can use these systems to their full potential.”

The third SC10 technological thrust area, data-intensive computing, will spotlight innovative research and solutions for managing data across distributed HPC systems, especially hardware and software requirements for effective data transfer.

“As high-performance computing becomes widespread and more users are accessing these systems, they are generating unprecedented amounts of data that need to be shared, sorted and stored efficiently, and must be easily accessible with high performance for analysis,” said Michelle Butler, technical program manager for Storage Enabling Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications and SC10 co-chair of the data-intensive computing thrust area with Patricia Kovatch of National Institute for Computational Sciences. “Through this thrust area, we’ll discuss innovative techniques in use today or in the future for data management that can address this issue.”

13 Workshops to Be Featured at SC10 Technical Program

The SC10 Technical Program Committee also has selected 13 workshops that will be featured this year. Workshops will highlight aspects of the SC10 technological thrust areas. The following workshops will take place in full, half and multi-day sessions, depending on the topic:

33 Tutorials to be featured as part of the SC10 Technical Program

The SC10 Technical Program Committee has selected 33 tutorials that will showcase current and developing practices in the community, covering a range of topics from basic parallel concepts and understanding the performance of HPC applications to advanced techniques for using GPUs. The tutorials are:

In addition to the Technical Program, SC10 continues its tradition of providing an unparalleled exhibit space, which uniquely brings together leaders in academia, research, government and industry. The SC10 exhibit floor is a natural complement to the technical program as a venue for debuting the most leading-edge prototypes and services in the HPC and advanced networking field. Read more about SC10 exhibits.

Lastly, the SC Communities programs will also return to SC10. Communities is designed to support emerging leaders and groups that have traditionally been under-represented in computing by providing opportunities for students, faculty, early-career professionals, and international attendees to participate in the SC Conference. SC10 Communities includes the Education Program, Broader Engagement,Ambassadors, Student Cluster Competition (a shared event with the Technical Program), and Student Volunteers activities. Learn more about SC Communities.

Read more about the SC10 Technical Program.