Various SMU faculty and OIT HPC staff annually attend the international conference known as “Supercomputing.” The location of this year’s Supercomputing 2018 (SC18) conference in Dallas at the same time that SMU’s own investment and ascendance into a regional supercomputing powerhouse offered an opportunity for SMU to not merely attend—but, in the form of our own booth, to proudly showcase our research work and to assert SMU’s place among computational peers.
SC18 is made up of HPC and other computing innovators and professionals. The conference brings together researchers, scientists, engineers, developers, inventors, hardware vendors, strategic decision-makers and many other technology heavy-weights from big-business, big-data, universities and government research agencies throughout the world. The conference provides broad and significant opportunities for this unique community to interact and to learn more about both extraordinary technologies and new knowledge being generated in computational science. Typically attended by more than 12,000 attendees, Supercomputing is a showcase of the innovations in HPC, computational systems and in offering resources as to how those technology tools create data that changes the world.
This year’s conference marked the 30th anniversary of the SC Conference Series, and with the theme of “HPC Inspires”—provided the perfect environment for SMU’s “ManeFrame II”-themed booth which showcased our advances in computational research, virtual reality, and world-renowned gaming development. SMU’s booth featured three scrolling screens which depicted the SMU research community’s activities and work across the sciences, engineering and the humanities. Throughout the conference, the booth was attended by SMU undergraduate and graduate research students, staff from the Center for Computational Science, and personnel from OIT’s research support team.