November 14, 2005

Compiled by Bill Kramer, General Chair

Overall Conference

• This is the 18^th in a series of conferences devoted to High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
• As of 11/14/05 there are 8709 attendees at the conference
• SC|05 is entirely a volunteer effort, with over 500 volunteers offering their time and expertise – Note this is only the names in the committee data base. I need to add SCinet
• There are 87 Students volunteering at SC|05
• For the first time in the series, SC|05 has its own cocktail – the Super Computini designed by the Master Mixologists at the Westin Hotel Seattle
• Many conference sessions will be archived and available through the ACM Digital Library.
• The approved budget for SC|05 is over $4.3 Million
• The conference will provide at least $300,000 to the ACM and IEEE/CS to support other activities.
• The conference is non-profit, breakeven and does not carry over money
• The conference will give awards Seymour Cray, Sidney Fernbach, Best Paper, Best Student Paper, Best Poster, Gordon Bell Prize, Bandwidth Challenge, StoreCloud Challenge, HPC Analytics Challenge and the Tri-Challenge Awards

Technical Program

• The technical program consists of 62 Technical Papers, 27 Tutorials, four invited speakers, 16 Masterworks presentations, 5 panels, 40 Birds of a Feather, 12 Workshops, 38 Posters and one keynote.
• The Technical Papers represent hundreds of thousands of hours of research described by more than 600 authors in 260 paper submissions, reviewed by a committee of 248 of their peers to select the 62 best papers to be presented in only 31 hours at SC|05.
• Of the 62 accepted papers, 3 nominated for the Gordon Bell Prize to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing; another 3 paper submissions also nominated for this prize. Also 4 of the 62 papers nominated for Best Student Paper and 4 more nominated for SC|05 Best Paper.
• There are at least 26 other external organization meetings going on in conjunction with SC|05
• There are more than 3,000 people registered for the technical program – more than ever before.
• There are more than 664 people registered for the tutorial program – more than ever before.

Exhibits

• A total of 107,310 sf of net exhibit is sold. The gross sf is 220,748 sf. (level 4 exhibits and level 6E)  – Both are new records
• There are 265 exhibitors
• 105 Research Exhibitors
• 160 Industrial Exhibitors
• There are 58 first-time exhibitors (48 industry and 10 research)
• First multi-level exhibition area
• The Exhibitor Forum – which showcases exhibitor information includes 14 sessions and 44 separate presentations, selected from 61 proposals from Industry Exhibitors. 

SCinet

• SC|05 has 540 Gigabits per second of Wide Area Connectivity – more than 5 times the past record. Is it more than ½ a Terabit/s!
• This is more than most countries
• SCinet is architected to real life model a regional networks, with Distributed NOCs serving the role of cities. This may be the most complicated routing problem every tried at these rates.
• SCinet uses more the 48 miles of fiber installed in the convention center by SCinet.
• There are 9 Bandwidth Challenges
• SCinet is supporting the largest Infiniband Deployment – more than 30 locations – ever attempted
• The SC|05 wireless infrastructure is the most advanced and largest conference implementation known.
• SCinet uses advanced Intrusion Detection Systems operating at 40 Gbps.
• 56 institutions and vendors are participating in SCinet

Education

• There are 140 Educators
  • 75 K-12 teachers
  • 40 undergraduate faculty
  • 25 undergraduate students
• The educators come from 20 different states
• The program is has created 12 different course modules that will be reused
• The Education Program is funded by the ACM and the IEEE/CS

SC Global

• SCGlobal provides a separate conference stream to 44 sites in 10 countries on 6 continents.
• Over 50 institutions and vendors are participating in SC Global
• SC Global presentations originate from sites all over the globe from Europe to Asia Pacific

SC Desktop

• This is the first time a conference of this size is providing all its technical session content to 'Virtual Attendees' - anyone anywhere! This is a new initiative is focused on people not able to attend the conference in person.
• More than 60 parties are paying a modest fee to participate in this new delivery method from 9 countries and 4 continents.

StorCloud

• 860 Terabytes in 34 cabinets
• Equating to 2,000 disk drives
• Weighing 20 tons
• Consuming 208 kilowatts of power
• Requiring 56 tons of AC
• Using 1 mile of power whips
• 69 miles of fibre runs were installed in the convention Center by SC|05 to support StorCloud applications.
• There are 6 StorCloud challenge applications and 6 non-challenge applications
• StorCloud's capacity is so great that it can hold 80 years of video recording or 1,000 years of music without once repeating a song or program.
• StorCloud's success is contributed to the generosity of 24 commercial vendors and 16 committee institutions

HPC Analytics

• SC|05 is the first time the conference series adds the focus on High Performance Analysis.
  • HPC Analytics is approaches for sophisticated data analysis and/or visualization with powerful analytics applications solving complex, real-world problems
• There were 21 Analytics Challenge intent to participate submissions and 11 final submissions for judging, with six finalists
• 14 institutions and vendors are participating in HPC Analytics

Communications

• SC|05 will produce more than 30 press releases, 100 web pages and over 200 pages of program material
• InfoStar is an exciting new wireless information system that supports the SC2005 conference. Designed by a multidisciplinary special-initiatives volunteer team from industry, national labs, and academia, InfoStar combines multiple data sources, wireless communications, collaborative software, and an innovative data clustering and visualization technology to provide conference attendees with unprecedented access to SC conference information on a real-time basis.
• SC|05 has produced its own legacy video, which will be freely distributed from the ACM web site.

Minority Serving Institutions Program

• There are 43 Educators, IT professionals Senior Level Administrators from MSIs representing 13 states, Washington DC and Puerto Rico and Hawaii
• 21 undergraduate instructors
• 1 College President
• 21 IT specialists, researchers and program managers
• SC|05 is the first time the program has expanded to have events to span 5 days of the conference.
• MSI tech professionals will demo and set up mini Access Grid Nodes on the lap tops of interested MSI participants during the conference. The Access Grid facilitates one to group or group to group remote and distributed communication via advanced networks.
• As a result of the SC MSI Program in 2001 MSI faculty and IT professionals have formed an organization called the Minority Serving Institutions Network www.msinetwork.org. The organization meets weekly over the Access Grid.  The aim of the MSI Network is to broaden a pathway of diversity to computing.
• The MSI Program is funded by the ACM and the IEEE/CS

Infrastructure

• SC|05 will create over 1000 signs
• As of October 27, 2005, SC|05 attendees are using at least 21 hotels with 13,500 hotelnights and 3235 rooms booked on peak nights. At conference time, it will be significantly more.
• 1,200 Gallons of coffee
• 8,000 dozen pastry
• 20,0000 cold drinks
• 9,000 meals