Myricom at
Myricom's SC2004 booth
The Exhibit Team. The Myricom team attending and exhibiting at SC2004 were Susan Blackford, Member Technical Staff; Dr. Nan Boden, Executive Vice President; John Daley, Senior Programmer; Patrice Duffort, Director of EMEA Sales; Nelson Escobar, Programmer;
Dr. Markus Fischer, Senior Programmer; Andrew Gallatin, Senior Programmer; Dr. Patrick Geoffray, Senior Programmer; Andrew Zhigang Huo, Research Intern; Gay Lynn Moore, Director of Public Relations; Dave PeGan, Vice President, Sales; Dr. Loic Prylli, Senior Programmer; Dr. Chuck Seitz, CEO & CTO; Marty Stewart, Executive Assistant; and Louise Toussaint, Inside Sales Coordinator.
Booth Demonstrations. The Myricom booth pictured above had a theme for each of the four corners:
The feature attraction of Myricom's SC2004 exhibit was the new Myrinet switches for large clusters. A pair of switches in the Clos256+256 configuration were connected "back-to-back" to form a 512-host switch (see the photo to the right). The 11 Myrinet hosts in the booth all connected to host ports of this switch (501 of the host ports were unused).
Another live demonstration was of the performance of the beta MX (Myrinet Express) software, showing 3.1µs MPI latency between dual-Opteron hosts with E cards. This beta software is available by sending email to help@myri.com.
The booth also included a pair of plasma displays in the middle. One of the plasma displays was devoted to the outstanding results for Myrinet in the Nov-04 TOP500. The tabulation provided on the TOP500 web site shows that 193 of the Nov-04 TOP500 supercomputers use Myrinet, the most of any interconnect. The top Myrinet cluster, and the top cluster in the world, is the new MareNostrum blade cluster in Spain. The other plasma display was devoted to expository slides on Myrinet components and software.
The Myricom booth was busy much of the time. We do not have the final SC2004 attendance figures, but at the signup for SC2005 the organizers suggested that the SC2004 attendance would be ~7500, which would be similar to the SC2003 attendance of 7,641. The Myricom attendees saw many old friends, and we gave away lots of Myrinet poker chips and lapel pins as "favors."
Other Highlights. Myricom received an HPCwire reader's choice award for "Most Innovative - Networking." Chuck Seitz, Myricom's CEO & CTO, gave a brief talk at the Apple customer event on Wednesday evening. Other Myricom technical and sales people gave numerous off-site presentations to our customers and partners.
Pittsburgh was very pleasant during SC2004, and the conference, exhibit, and hotel arrangements were near-ideal. Our top restaurant recommendation from this trip is "Tin Angel."
A small part of the SC2004 exhibit floor (Myricom booth near the center of the photo)
We're now looking forward to ISC2005, to be held 21-24 June 2005 in Heidelberg, and to SC2005, to be held in November 2005 in Seattle.
12 November 2004, updated 18 November