Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would also like to welcome you to ISC11 here in
beautiful Hamburg. And in the next 15 minutes, I will provide you with a brief and rough
overview what to expect in the next four days. But before that, I will give you some information
about the ISC11 attendance. So as you might know, since more than 25 years, we have been
growing constantly. Last year, we currently missed the 2000 threshold, and so we have
been very excited if we would again set a new record. And I will disclose the secret
right away. As for now, we have exactly 2,068 registrations, but I have learned from previous
ISC that many folks still register on-site, so we expect the final number between 2,200
and 2,300. And that, of course, is a new record. So where do ISC11 come from? Well, the ISC11
is a new record. It is a new record. It is a new record. It is a new record. It is a
new record. It is a new record. It is a new record. It is a new record. It is a new record
that ISC11 attendance come from, and the answer is simple. They come from all over
the globe. And to be more precise, they come from exactly 52 countries, some first-time
countries included. And obviously, the biggest represented country is Germany, which does
not come as a surprise since ISC is located in Germany. But since a few years, the Germans
share keeps decreasing because just the other countries grow so fast. When I joined ISC
back in 2002, the German share was almost 70%, and this year we are dealing with a share
of approximately 37%, 38%. The second largest country is the United States, then comes the
UK, France, Russia, and Japan for several reasons almost tripled their attendance numbers
this year. So the steady growth of ISC applies also for the conference program. Last year,
we added an extra conference day, and this year we extended the pre-conference program
with two workshops and full-day tutorials. And these, the workshops and the tutorials,
they took place yesterday, and were attended by almost 400 people. And we are exceptionally
proud that one of these workshops was autonomously organized by the Asian HPC community, and
this workshop alone, HPC in Asia, attracted almost 100 people. The other workshop, by
the way, focused on HPC for small and medium-sized people. And the other workshop, by the way,
focused on HPC for small and medium-sized enterprises. The clearest sign, in my opinion,
for the growing complexity of our program is the number of speakers. As mentioned before,
399 people contributed to ISC11, which is a growth of more than 60% compared to last
year. At ISC, we distinguish between invited sessions, where the topics and the speakers
have been handpicked, contributed sessions where the selection process has been made
by a call for participation, and the industry sessions like the Hot Seat and the Exhibitor
Forum, where the HPC vendors are represented. And if you look at the current number of the
contributed sessions, you might notice that there is still potential for growth, and that
is exactly the reason why we set up the partnership with IEEE for ISC12.
On this slide, I would like to introduce some new or quite unknown activities at ISC11.
First of all, we will stream several talks and even complete sessions live to the Internet,
and this service is cordially provided by Dr. Felbecker and his team from the University
of Hamburg. So if you have any colleagues who could not make it to ISC, please let them
know of this service. We will again run our daily video blogs, and they will be posted
the next day on our YouTube channel. And moreover, we will be producing two new formats. The
first one, the Think Tank, is a joint effort by ISC and our media sponsor, HPC Wire, and
the idea behind the Think Tank is to discuss one single topic with three different panels,
a user panel, a vendor panel, and an analyst panel. And this year's topic will be challenges
for HPC and the cloud. All three panels will be recorded by professional video teams and
broadcast it after what works on YouTube. Then we will have the Analyst Crossfire, a
new and very dynamic format first introduced at SC10 in New Orleans, and there the Modern
operator, Edison Snell, will put two HPC vendors and two HPC users in the Crossfire.
And like the Think Tank, this will be recorded and posted on YouTube right after the conference.
And by the way, this will take place within the closing session. If you are planning to
post tweets about us, please use our general hashtag, ISC11. And yeah, we will also run
a so-called Twitter wall for two presentations. The first one is the ISC conference keynote
by Professor Makram in about an hour. And the second one is the GPU debate between David
Kirk from NVIDIA and Thomas Sterling tomorrow morning. And by using the specific hashtag
ISCTalk, you can comment lively on the speeches and even can pose questions to the actors.
We have set up a live portal for ISC11. There you can access all tweets about ISC11 and
all newsfeed from our media sponsors. There you will find the most current photographs
and the before mentioned videos. The URL is isc11.org slash live.
We have developed a specific color scheme to help you navigate through our program much
easier. And you will find these colors on the program signs throughout the building,
but also in the conference guide and on this exhibition flyer. For example, invited sessions
are marked red, contributed sessions, dark blue, exhibition green, and so on. And okay,
let's take a closer look at the program elements of ISC11. As mentioned before, yesterday we
had tutorials and workshops. This conference just kicked off with this opening session
and will last until Thursday afternoon. That is basically the same structure and schedule
like last year. The exhibition will already start today at 3 p.m. That means we will have
three more exhibition hours this year. A lineup of 152 exhibitors awaits you on the show floor,
which is, by the way, a new record too. External events are events organized by third parties.
And all of these external events are free to all ISC attendees. For example, tomorrow
there is a full day symposium organized by the King Abdullah University of Science and
Technology. There are other external events, so please get more information with our program.
We will have daily social events. Tonight we start with the ISC welcome party at 6 p.m.
Tomorrow there are several vendor parties, at least 12 I know of, and usually these parties
require personal invitations by the host, so please contact the companies on the exhibition
floor, show floor, to get your personal invitation. Wednesday we are all invited by the City of
Hamburg to a reception at the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, and Thursday ISC11 closes with
the traditional farewell lounge. And for the first time we will have live music there
too. The next couple of slides I would like to introduce our new fancy tool, which is
called the ISC Agenda Planner, and this is supposed to help you to get the most value
out of our program. The ISC Agenda Planner has several categories. For example, that
is the overview, and the overview of the complete program, the complete week, and you will
notice that we are using our colors here too, so this allows you to capture at a glance,
for example the structure of a single day, so for example you notice that today there
are a couple of invited sessions in the afternoon, a contributed session, and you see also that
the exhibition starts at 3. We have a daily view in the Agenda Planner, this is Monday,
this is Tuesday, where you have more information like the location, the session names, and
by clicking on a specific session you receive more information like the chairman, the presenters,
and so on, and you can even drill down further to the speaker of the presentations like that.
I don't want to get too deep into this tool, I just want to encourage you to use it. We
have other functions implemented like kind of a search mask, possibility to create your
own schedule, export it to PDF or even iCal, and a complete section for the exhibition.
Now I come to my last slide, this is for those of you who have never been to this venue,
this is the ground floor, we are currently here in Hall 3, here is the entrance, the
registration area, and lunch will be served here in Hall 4 and the foyer, and by crossing
the ground level foyer you will reach the exhibition hall. Basically we are using four
lecture rooms, Hall 3, this one is the largest one, and we are running three other lecture
rooms on the first floor, and you can reach them by walking through this gangway using
the escalator upstairs, and there you will find Hall B and the two sections of Hall C.
So that is the end, and I wish all of us a successful week and enjoy your stay, thank you.