Pardon the Disruption: SC10 Seeks HPC Game Changers 

The SC10 international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, is searching for technologies with the potential to disrupt the current technology landscape.  As part of its annual Disruptive Technologies Program, SC is providing a dedicated exhibition area featuring such technologies.

SC10 will take place in New Orleans, LA, from November 13 to 19, 2010. The conference anticipates more than 11,000 attendees from industry, academia and government. Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), SC10 offers a complete technical education program and exhibition to showcase the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce.

Disruptive Technologies, which has taken place as part of SC since 2006, examines new computing architectures and interfaces that will significantly impact the high-performance computing field throughout the next five to 15 years, but have not yet emerged in current systems.

“Disruptive” technologies represent drastic innovations in current practices, such that they have the potential to completely transform the high-performance computing field as it currently exists — ultimately overtaking the leading technologies or software tools in the marketplace.

Since Disruptive Technologies premiered at the conference in 2006, participants have focused on enabling technologies for the most advanced computing systems envisioned for 2020 and beyond. Although the timeframe has been less specific in past years, attendees still use this SC track to predict changes they’ll see in both research and academia high performance computing in coming years.

“For the SC10 Disruptive Technologies Program, we will especially focus on critical technologies required to reach exascale computing within the next decade, in which systems will be capable of running a million trillion calculations per second,” said SC10 Disruptive Technologies Program Chair John Shalf. “The coming changes to hardware on the path to exascale computing are extremely disruptive, so any technology that overcomes hurdles to exascale computing will be ‘disruptive’ by definition.  The SC10 program will serve as a forum for us to discuss and debate these changing technologies, which we could be adopting in the future.”

SC10 Disruptive Technologies Program will feature panel sessions and an exhibit showcase, and the conference is taking submissions for topics through Thursday, August 5, 2010. Participants can send their proposals to the SC10 submissions Web site, http://submissions.supercomputing.org.

For questions about this program, please contact disruptive-techs@info.supercomputing.org.