Vendor Spotlight:

WORLD CLASS SGI USER GROUP REBORN

Silicon Graphics, Inc. customers and partners representing 13 countries assembled in Orlando, Florida, from May 23-27, 2004, to officially form a worldwide SGI User Group (SGIUG) focused on technical users of high performance computing (HPC), storage, and visualization. Over 60 technical presentations on best practices with SGI HPC, storage and visualization technology were presented during the conference. Attendees also participated in elections and selected as President, Walt Brooks, Chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division.

"We formed the independent SGI User Group for several extremely valuable reasons," said Brooks. "One, new users get current, up-to-date information about SGI as a company and on their products, and there are quite frank and candid discussions with SGI engineers and the key people at the company as to what is happening with those products. Two, it's an excellent opportunity for SGI to get valuable feedback from those customers who are in fact using their products. And three, the published proceedings will have an on-going impact in the HPC world."

The four-day technical conference opened with a Keynote by Lucian Plesea of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) entitled "Remote Imaging and Supercomputing-A Match Made on Earth." Additionally, SGI Chairman and CEO Bob Bishop along with CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh provided insight into the focus and strategic directions for the company.

"It's impossible to overstate the importance of interaction and idea exchange between our customers, partners and engineering community," said Bishop. "SGIUG is a very powerful forum and speaks to the health of our company and its strength of mission in HPC, storage and visualization."

Additional elected SGIUG officers and directors rounding out the SGIUG organization include:

• Vice President: Terry Hewitt, Head of Supercomputing, Visualization and E- Science (SVE) and Director of the International AVS Centre at Manchester Computing, UK.
• Treasurer: Larry Eversole, Deputy Manager, High Performance Information Technology, Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) Supercomputing and Visualization Facility. Former President of the HP User Group and Secretary of the Cray User Group.
• Secretary: Gary Jensen, Conference Organizer, Consultant.
• SGI Liaison and Member of the Board: Neil Bannister, SGI Engineering Manager for the file-system group.
• Director - Visualization: Gwen Pech, Faculty member, BP Center for Visualization, University of Colorado.
• Director - Applications/Performance Tuning: Andrew Jones, Deputy Head HPC Team, University of Manchester, UK.
• Deputy Chair: Dr. Chris Catherasoo, Technical Group Supervisor, Supercomputing and Visualization Facility, JPL.
• Director - SGI Altix: Paul White, HPC Systems Manager (CSAR - Computer Services for Academic Research), CSC Supercomputing, Farnborough, UK.
• Director - Storage and CXFS: John Lynch, Chief Hardware Architect, Northrop Grumman Corp.
• Director - User Services: Chuck Niggley, NASA Ames Research Center
• Director - Grid Computing: Norbert Meyer, HPC Department Manager, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Poznan, Poland.
• Director - SGI Origin and IRIX: Liz Cox, System Administrator, NASA Ames Research Center.
• Director - Web Master: Marek Zawadzki, System Administrator, Poznan Supercomputing & Networking Center (PSNC), Poznan, Poland.

An important element to the overall program was the active participation of SGI's partners and reseller community. Premier sponsors included Brocade, Engenio Information Technologies, StorageTek, S2io, and YottaYotta. In addition a Partner Pavillion evening reception brought users together with 14 hardware and software vendors for face-to-face meetings and discussions.

"Many SGI partners were in attendance to share their expertise and respond to real-life, in the trenches, customer concerns, and receive some well-deserved customer praise as well," said Larry Eversole, SGIUG treasurer. "The importance of partner engagement in the user group was evident in their superb contributions to the sessions, which went well beyond touting their products to providing serious, forward-thinking papers on advancing supercomputing and visualization on both Linux OS-based SGI Altix systems, as well as traditional SGI IRIX OS-based systems."

SGI partner sessions included: Thomas Cheng of Discreet Logic, discussing Discreet's Open Access using SGI InfiniteStorage solutions; Randy Kresier of Engenio Information Technologies providing an overview of I/O and storage tuning tips and techniques; and Adam Thurston of Fakespace outlining the Fakespace Interaction Engine for the purpose of extending the Input and collaborative capabilities of HPC.

The 60-plus technical papers were presented in five key areas - defense and security, science and research, manufacturing, energy, and media. Sample papers include:

• Defense and Security: Attacking the IRIX OS-The Past, the Present, and the Future, by Adam Gowdiak, Security Team of PSNC
• Science and Research: Calculating Our Origins On an SGI Origin 2000, by Scott Kenyon, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
• Manufacturing: Omni Directional Stereo for Wide Field of View Displays, by Randall Smith, General Motors R&D
• Energy: The Role of Visualization Resource Exploration and Development, by Geoffrey Dorn, BP (British Petroleum) Center for Visualization (University of Colorado)
• Media: "Broadcast Workflow" and a separate paper "Digital Intermediates," by Chris Golson of SGI

More generic papers included an Intel Roadmap Update-What's In Store for Itanium by Jason Waxman of Intel, and a presentation by Gordon Saladino (also of Intel) entitled The Future of Debugging.

"Overall, the SGIUG conference was a tremendous success, even though we are just beginning", said Gary Jensen, SGIUG secretary. "Throughout the year our goal is to share information and continue improving the technical productivity of SGI high performance computing, data storage and visualization systems. We encourage and invite all SGI HPC, visualization and storage customers to join, participate, and attend next year's conference in Europe (exact city and dates still to be determined), which will be hosted by the Poznan Supercomputing & Networking Center."

For more information about the SGIUG 2004 conference visit http://www.sgiug.org.