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Report from SuperComputing '99 November 24th, 1999 Since none of the LWN.net staff were able to attend this year's SuperComputing '99 (SC99) conference, Susan Spring at Aspen Systems was kind enough to send in a report and some pictures from the events. SC99 in Portland was an exciting and educational show for everybody involved and I think it's safe to say that there was more raw brain and computing power on the SC99 exhibit floor and conferences than anywhere on the planet last week. Beowulf clusters running Linux dominated the show, as, I gathered from a number of last year's attendees, it did the previous year. There is some serious competition brewing between the major networking providers, namely Myrinet, Giganet & Dolphin, yet it seems to me that all three of these vendors have their place in the market, since they each address specific and distinct requirements depending upon the applications. There was some good buzz about shared memory systems (which, by the way, Aspen has built for some of our more recent clusters) and shared storage (RAID). Wall and immersion displays ruled the show, especially with the research exhibitors. The show was loosely segmented into industry exhibitors, research exhibitors and non-exhibiting attendees. Some of the research exhibitors were displaying projects that could certainly be classified as commercial product prototypes, such as Futures Lab / Argonne Lab's conference-room sized ActiveMural Project tiled wall display, driven by a 6-node Pentium cluster running Linux. Attendees also had the option of attending the myriad of seminars offered. All the big names, such as Dell, HP, Compaq, SGI, and SUN were there. We heard many rumors of Itanium (Intel's Merced motherboard) running Linux, but couldn't find one. Here are a few photo highlights Welcome to SC99, November 13 - 19 1999 Ward Y-B Deng of Kachina Technologies and Steve Spring of Aspen Systems discuss Kachina's Debian Linux distribution and SAL internet portal, which currently links to over 2,540 Linux scientific and engineering applications. Their distribution, which is still under development, will include all of these applications as well as quarterly updates. Tux steals the show outside of Hyperchip's booth. Hyperchip develops carrier-class switches and routers scalable from terabits to petabits per second. So, for all of you who are wondering what the heck a petabit is, well, good question & one that I asked the Hyperchip folks - a petabit represents transfer rates that are 1,000 times faster than the terabit. Gives your Beowulf more bite. . . . Aspen's custom rackmount Beowulf technology (also shown ) drew a lot of attention from both attendees & research & industry exhibitors. Here, Aspen demos their unique 1U rackmount technology. SC99's networking backbone (and again) and schematic. --Susan Spring

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