Heard Something Funny at SC09?

Heard Something Funny at SC09? Join the Portland subculture by submitting your overheard quotes to Overheardinpdx.blogspot.com.

Just email what you heard and where you heard it to this address: overheardinpdx@gmail.com

Super-Powered SC Conference Network Goes Live

For seven days, the Oregon Convention Center will be home to the most powerful network in the world – SCinet. Built each year for the annual SC conference, SCinet brings to life a highly sophisticated and extreme local and wide area network fabric that can support the revolutionary applications and network experiments that have become a trademark of the conference.

SC09 held from November 14-20, 2009, focuses on the latest advances in high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. With a massive 400 Gigabits per second in bandwidth capacity – more than most networks in the world – SCinet supports exhibitors from industry and academia to demonstrate their most aggressive supercomputing and networking applications that are either in production or in an experimental or pre-commercial state.

SCinet is designed and built by over 140 volunteers from universities, government and industry and leverages $20 million in donated equipment from leaders in the technology sector who seek the opportunity to showcase their products in this highly advanced network environment. This year, the team has deployed over 200 miles of fiber optic cable in the Oregon Convention Center and is utilizing over 34 miles of fiber in the regional Portland area to make these network capabilities possible.

SCinet links the conference center to research and commercial networks around the world like the Department of Energy’s ESnet, the Internet2 Network and National LambdaRail. SCinet will support the exa-floods of data from SC09 exhibitors and attendees and will then measure and monitor every aspect of the network's performance to provide the public a unique real-time window into the core of this powerful network’s inner-workings and operations. Live network traffic will be available online via: http://measurement.sc09.org/public

"The SCinet team has worked diligently over the past twelve months to design and build what we consider to be the most robust network capable of supporting the leading-edge applications of the conference’s exhibitors and attendees, who are known for pushing network and computing resources to the extreme each year,” said Ralph McEldowney, Chief, Advanced Technologies Section, Air Force Research Laboratory Supercomputing Resource Center and SC09 SCinet committee chair. Full Story

SC09 Social Media Takes off With Purdue's Need4Feed

Social Media has already taken off at SC09!

Purdue University has developed a new Twitter analytics tool called need4feed.com that does an amazing job of aggregating all the #SC09 tweets into one place


How it Works:

A conference hash tag is the classic, "if a tree falls in the forest..." problem. If someone tweets the hash, and nobody is there to follow, does it make a sound? Sifting through conference backchannel banter can be an onerous task for anyone. With all the retweets, replies, comments and questions, it can be difficult to find that one, 140 character gem.

Need4feed is a Twitter analytics tool that analyzes tweets within the context of a conference hash tag - in this case #sc09. It uses an algorithm that examines responses to specific tweets, and builds a popularity ranking for that tweet. This ranking identifies those tweets that may have broad appeal for others using the same hash tag.

The popularity ranking comes in two flavors - those tweets that are popular now and those that have been popular overall. The 'now' ranking takes the approach, what is being discussed now is more popular than what was discussed an hour ago. The 'overall' ranking suggests that what was once popular will always be popular.

So now you can join in the fun! Twitter users, just add #sc09 to your tweets.

Attending SC09? Help us Tweet it Up

Attending SC09? Help us Tweet Up the show! John West over at Inside HPC has the details:

"A bunch of you attending SC09 this year will have netbooks/cellphones/laptops/cranial implants that allow you to Twitter in real time. I hope you’ll take advantage of the opportunity to give others at the show — and those that cannot attend — insights into what you are learning and experiencing throughout the week. See a really cool technology, or even a company that’s bound to fail? Tweet it!

To make sure that everyone’s comments are easy to follow, the SC09 conference is encouraging the use of the #sc09 hashtag. As we often do for large events in the community, insideHPC will be including the stream for the #sc09 hashtag right on the website, so you won’t have to go far to learn what everyone at the show is up to."

Sound complicated? It's not really. Just add these five characters: #sc09 to your SC09 twitter entries and we'll aggregate it all in one place.