Supercomputing '07: Sufficient Bandwidth, After Some Heavy Lifting, But Power's Another Story

I spent much of Tuesday at Supercomputing ‘07 in Reno, NV. I’d never attended a Supercomputing conference before, and I really enjoyed perusing the plentiful exhibits (this show was far bigger than I thought it’d be) and interacting with the vendors. Traditional CPU-based systems were present in abundance, of course, but I also noticed a profusion of FPGA- and GPU-accelerated designs (along with software development tools for them), thereby validating my career-long coverage of both topics.

I also attended two fascinating presentations on high-performance computing applications in automobile design, the details of which I’ll save for a standalone blog post to come soon. For now, I thought I’d highlight some of the introductory remarks made by Becky Verastegui, the SC07 General Chairperson, prior to the fascinating conference keynote by MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld, head of the university’s Center for Bits and Atoms (a spin-off of the well-known Media Lab founded by Nicholas Negroponte). All the supercomputing hardware on exhibit at the show requires similarly abundant LAN and WAN bandwidth to feed it, of course, and in this regard the Reno-Sparks Convention Center is apparently ‘behind the times’ compared to its bigger sibling in Las Vegas, with which I’m far more familiar from longstanding attendance at shows such as CES, NAB and PMA.

Planning for SC07 began three years ago and, according to Verastegui, the organizing committee discovered that the network ‘pipe’ feeding the Convention Center didn’t meet the forecasted bandwidth and latency needs of exhibitors, presenters and attendees (thereby, perhaps, validating Reno’s long-used promotional tag line as the ‘Biggest Little City In The World’). Addressing this shortfall necessitated, among other things, digging up S. Virginia Street in order to run more fiber to the facilities (she didn’t say who paid for the project!). When all was said and done, the Convention Center encompassed 81.3 miles of fiber, capable of 202 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth, along with 94 wireless access points forecasted to service 2000 concurrent users. "Except during the keynote, when they’re turned off," Verastegui clarified, although she wasn’t quite right in this regard…I was able to access a conference AP during Gershenfeld’s presentation, although the signal wasn’t consistently solid and, even when I was connected, bandwidth was sparse and erratic.

So there seemed to be sufficient network resources for the show…but power was another story. The press room was located on the third floor of the Convention Center, overlooking (through glass windows) a portion of the exhibits area, and I was up there at lunchtime checking my email. Suddenly, I heard a loud ‘thunk’, immediately followed by power loss at the dual-G5 Power Mac I was using at the time….followed shortly thereafter by a highly audible ‘groan’ emanating from the show floor.

The above photos, taken a few minutes after the ‘thunk’, document the damage done. At first glance, you might think nothing’s wrong…but note that the overhead lights are extinguished. Note, too. the blurred visages of in-motion show attendees, indicating how dim the ambient light was. Power was in the process of being restored, and some of the computers had rebooted by the time I snapped the shots, but many were still offline. And judging from the volume of the collective ‘moan’, few (to none) of the vendors were using UPSs for battery-backed power!

I’ll close with a snapshot of some particularly fetching signage. Click on the image for a full-res version; in the t-shirt, the bullfighter’s cape says ‘Infiniband’, and the bull’s thinking ‘I Love Amateur Night’. As I mentioned in a January, 2004 feature article, for example, the pervasive Ethernet juggernaut is increasingly encroaching on turf historically serviced by dedicated-function interconnect interfaces, both industry-standard and proprietary. Fulcrum Microsystems’ ‘Ethernet Keeps On Charging’ promotion piece neatly summarizes that reality.