When the International Supercomputing Conference convenes next year for its 28th annual global HPC forum, it will be in new surroundings — the city of Leipzig. ISC’13 will be held June 16 – 20, 2013. With the move to Leipzig, which has been a major center for international trade since 1165, ISC caps a very successful four-year run in Hamburg. In fact, the conference’s success in Hamburg helped drive the move to Leipzig. ISC had outgrown the facilities in the Congress Center Hamburg.
ISC began as a small conference in Mannheim in 1986, but soon had to move from the university campus to a local conference center. As the conference program and exhibition continued to grow, ISC moved first to Heidelberg for several years and then in 2006 moved to Dresden. After three years of continued growth, the conference headed to Hamburg, where attendance has grown about 20 percent each year.
“It’s a very nice challenge to have — the need to keep finding larger and more extensive conference sites to accommodate our growth,” said ISC Executive Director Martin Meuer. “As we drew more attendees, our conference program expanded, and as more people came to ISC, more exhibitors signed up to meet with leading HPC experts from around the world.”
In looking for a new location, ISC organizers sought a unique convention center with an exhibition hall big enough to accommodate the growing exhibition, but more importantly, a venue with adequate modern conference and meeting rooms with extensive built-in audio visual equipment. Furthermore, the rooms needed to be in various sizes to cater for different types of meetings. As most people spend the whole day in meeting rooms, natural lighting was also a priority. Sites in various cities around Germany were assessed.
The Congress Center Leipzig (CCL), located within the Leipzig Trade Fair Grounds, features distinctive architecture, the state-of-the-art facilities and sophisticated technical equipment installed in all the meeting rooms.
Additionally, CCL’s competence and experience in hosting the annual Leipzig Book Fair — the second largest book fair in Germany which attracts close to 170,000 visitors — made a strong impression. The city has a history of hosting trade fairs for centuries, with the oldest record dating to 1165.
Martin Buhl-Wagner, CEO of Leipzig Trade Fair, welcomes the organizers of ISC and guarantees best conditions for the conference: “ISC is a highly successful event, and we are very glad it’s coming to Leipzig. The CCL hosts about 100 conferences per year. We have an excellent infrastructure and a service quality that is far above average, to cater for the needs of large-scale international meetings. I’m convinced that ISC will continue its positive development and that the participants will enjoy their stay in Leipzig. Leipzig extends a very warm welcome to the new guests!”
About the city
Leipzig is an exceptional city, as it is a place where tradition meets dynamism and traditional Saxon Gemütlichkeit blends with high-tech business. The city has been a source of fascination for tradesmen, entrepreneurs, academics and artists alike. Bach, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Goethe and Schiller are some of the great personalities closely linked with Leipzig. Besides the musical heritage, Leipzig also offers a multifaceted cultural life, exciting museums, a shopping paradise and a high density of pubs and history at every turn. The Guardian newspaper selected Leipzig as the top travel destination of Germany in 2011 and the New York Times named Leipzig as its 10th favorite destination in its list of “The 31 Places to Go in 2010. The University of Leipzig is also one of the oldest in Europe. Goethe, Leibniz and Lessing had once been students of this alma mater.
Leipzig is just 118 miles from Berlin. Trains depart hourly during the day from the Berlin central station and, if you opt for the fast ICE train, you’ll be in Leipzig in about 70 minutes. If you choose to fly into the Leipzig-Halle airport, it will take you less than eight minutes to reach the exhibition grounds and 15 minutes to get to the city center by train. Trains depart hourly. A faster option would be to catch a taxi.
To find out more about the city Leipzig, the Congress Center and its services, you can visit www.isc13.org.
About ISC’13
Moving into its 28th year, ISC is the world’s oldest and one of the most important conferences for the HPC community, offering a strong five-day technical program with a wide range of expert speakers and exhibits from leading research centers and vendors. A number of events complement the technical program, including Tutorials, Workshops, Top500 Announcement, Research Paper Sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) Sessions, Research Poster Session, Think Tank Series, Analyst Crossfire, Exhibitor and Start-up Forums, and the popular Hot Seat Sessions in a new format featuring leaders from industry and research centers. The conference has experienced tremendous growth over the last few years, with an estimated 2,400 participants from around the world expected to convene in Leipzig, June 16 – 20.
