Opening Session

Chair:

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

This year’s highlights of the traditional Opening Session are the ISC’09 keynote talk and the presentation of the 33rd TOP500 list.

As early as one year before the Conference starts, we begin looking for the ideal person - a distinguished visionary leader from Europe, the U.S. or Asia - to hold the ISC keynote talk. In the past, we managed to win Gene Amdahl, Gordon Bell, David Burridge, Sidney Fernbach, Leonhard Kleinrock, Satoshi Matsuoka and Horst Simon as keynote speakers, just to name a few. This year, we are pleased to welcome as keynote speaker Andreas von Bechtolsheim, legendary Co-Founder & former Chief Architect at Sun Microsystems. He will give the ISC'09 keynote address on The Evolution of Interconnects for High Performance Computing.

We are also curious to hear what the 33rd TOP500 list will reveal. Since the beginning of the TOP500 project in 1993, the June edition of the TOP500 list with the fastest supercomputers in the world has been published at the International Supercomputing Conferences, ISC, in Germany. One year ago at ISC’08, we saw the very first Petaflop/s system - Roadrunner at LANL in Los Alamos, USA, making it into the TOP500. In the 32nd list at SC08 in Austin a second Petaflop/s system - the Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory called Jaguar – made the list as runner up of Roadrunner. There are different indications that Jaguar is even capable to grab the top spot in the next edition of the TOP500 list at ISC’09. The presentation of the 33rd TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers will include the Awarding of the #1 System Worldwide, #1 System Asia, #1 System Europe and #1 System Middle-East.

For the traditional ISC Award, the ISC Award Committee selects the best two papers from all papers accepted for the Scientific Sessions on June 23. The Scientific Program Committee decides on which submitted papers are accepted for the Scientific Sessions. The two ISC’09 Awards will be sponsored by Intel and by Sun Microsystems.

It will be the second time the PRACE Award will be presented at the ISC Opening Session. PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, will award a prize to the best scientific paper by a European student or young scientist. The ISC Award Committee, too, selects the candidate for the PRACE Award.