On the Hot Seat: Grilling the Leading HPC Vendors with Tough Questions

The fast-paced Hot Seat Sessions have been a trademark of ISC for many, many years and are open to ALL conference and exhibition attendees.

No other HPC event in the world features a session where the audience has the unique opportunity to get a compact, comprehensive overview of the current HPC market from top vendors. In just two afternoons, 18 leading vendor representatives have ten minutes each to present their latest developments, new products and strategies. They then have to answer two tricky questions from a panel of hand-picked so-called “inquisitors”.

You just have to be there to see how vendors send their best people – CTOs and even CEOs – into the arena to fight for their products. You can sense these tough men’s nervousness and even their fear of the inquisitors. The vendor representatives do not know beforehand which two of the four inquisitors will ask them the probing questions, and they will have to defend themselves for five long minutes.

HOT SEAT SESSION 1

Co-Chairs:

Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode, Director of Leibniz Compute Center (LRZ) & Technische Universität München, Germany

Prof. Dr. Hans Meuer, ISC’09 General Chair, Prometeus & University of Mannheim, Germany

Inquisitors:

Prof. Dr. Jack Dongarra, University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of Tennessee & Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA

Sverre Jarp, Chief Technology Officer CERN openlab, CERN, Switzerland

Dr. Happy Sithole, Director, Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), South Africa

Dr. Gerhard Wellein, Head of High Performance Computing Group, Regionales RechenZentrum Erlangen (RRZE), Germany

HOT SEAT SESSION 2

Co-Chairs:

Prof. Dr. Thomas Ludwig, Professor, University of Hamburg, Department of Informatics & Director & CEO, German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), Germany

Dr. Erich Strohmaier, Head of Future Technology Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), USA

Inquisitors:

Prof. Dr. Frank Behrendt, Chair for Energy Process Engineering & Conversion Technologies for Renewable Energies, Berlin University of Technology, Germany

Dr. Fang-Pang Lin, Head of the Grid Application Division, National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC), Taiwan

Prof. Dr. Thomas Sterling, Arnaud & Edwards Professor of Computer Science, Louisiana State University, USA

Prof. Dr. Kathy Yelick, Director of NERSC & Professor of Computer Science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) & University of California at Berkeley, USA