CHPC well represented at ISC'09

When the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'09) event in Hamburg opened its door on 23 September 2009, it welcomed more than 1 650 attendees from all over the world, including several CHPC staff members. The annual International Supercomputing Conference is Europe's leading conference and exhibition on high performance computing, networking and storage. The event was opened by Professor Hans Meuer, co-founder of the ISC events.

Dr Happy Sithole (director: CHPC), Professor Colin Wright (acting head: research of the CHPC), Eric Mbele (CHPC systems administrator) and Sebastian Wyngaardt (research scientist) were responsible for setting up and manning the CHPC's stand at the event. They joined some 120 exhibitors from research institutions, academia, industry and media whose presence contributed to the thought leadership, lively information sharing and wide-ranging products and technologies on display.

"Each ISC event is a huge learning opportunity," reveals Wyngaard, for whom this was a first visit. "It was a great way to find out about the latest trends in graphical processing units used for visualisation." The range of software and hardware on display allowed him to consider the best options for building a GPU cluster.

ISC'09 provided a stage for sharing and learning by the best from the best. Of interest to the supercomputing fraternity was the presentation by Dr Cathal Seoighe of the National University of Ireland, whose CHPC flagship project (titled 'Models of HIV-1 immune escape and reversion') garnered interest. This is an instance of the use of supercomputing for modelling in the bioinformatics domain.

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