As I explained in my last post, the “official” birth of the SC17 conference was on November 17, 2016, 8:25. However, only a day later, I am “really officially” in charge of the SC conference, when in a little behind-the-scences ceremony, the Key of the SC Conference was passed on form the past chair (John West, SC16) to me.

John West (SC16 General Chair) presents the Key of the SC Conference to the audience — Picture by Phillip Roth

Official hand-over of the Key! — Picture by Phillip Roth

I am in charge! I have the Key! — Picture by Phillip Roth

The Key of the SC Conference. Pure gold, I guess 😉 Attached to the keys are little charms with the names of all SC General chairs. My first task will be to add another charm with my name. — Picture by Bernd Mohr

This is the second part of my “Things you never wanted to learn about SC, but I tell you anyhow!” (TynwtlaSC,bItya!)  posts 😉

My SC drinking mug, glasses, and bottles collection -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

My SC drinking mug, glasses, and bottles collection — Picture by Bernd Mohr

If you go to the same conference every year for a long time you collect some nice experiences and memories, but also you collect quite some souvenirs (ask my wife about it!). My typical souvenir is some conference logo wear like a t-shirt, polo shirt or sweater. If you have met me at work, you know that I wear them every day! Unfortunately, I collected so much SC pieces of clothing over the years that it will be quite some effort to get them out of my closets and arrange them all nicely on the floor, so I can take a picture of it. But if I ever get around to find the time for it, you will see it first here on this blog, I promise!

So, to get started, I took a picture of the various mugs, glasses, and bottles I collected at SC (see above). As you can see, SC makes quite some effort to have a large collection of shapes, volumes, and colors available over the years.

My mug and classes collection -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

My mug and glasses collection — Picture by Bernd Mohr

The SC glasses are actual just a small part of my collection of drinking classes from my business trips from all over the world. If you visit me in my office, I am happy to show them to you in detail. And if someone ever wonders what gift she or he wants to give to me when you are visiting Jülich, now you know … wink! wink!

Update Jan 29: Found some more glasses at home (see below) 😉

My SC drink glass collection - Picture by Bernd Mohr

My SC drink glass collection – Picture by Bernd Mohr

This is the first part of my “Things you never wanted to learn about SC, but I tell you anyhow!” (TynwtlaSC,bItya!)  posts 😉

When you organize a conference for over 10,000 people, even simple things like stuffing the conference bags become a large task! SC, the world-largest international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, has almost 5,000 people from all over the world attending the Technical Program. Each of them gets a conference bag which includes the printed conference programs, various sheets with announcements and useful information, sponsor advertisement material and sometimes small gifts. So, your task suddenly becomes: stuff 18 different item into each of the 5,500 conference bags as fast as possible!

[SC15 Conference Bag Stuffing]

SC15 Conference Bag Stuffing – Picture by Oliver Mohr

How do you do this? Of course, HPC specialists use a parallel processing based on a multi-pipelined approach!

First, you build up the pipelines: the material gets placed on a long row of tables, twice, on each side of the table. The volunteers walk done one side of the table picking up and collecting the different items along the way. At the end of the table, they hand it to another volunteer which inserts it into a conference bag, closes it, and in turn hands it to another set of volunteers which collect the bags and stack them for later behind the registration desk. Meanwhile, the first set of volunteers walk back the other side of the table, collecting the material for the next bag, and so on, before the start the cycle again. So each volunteer stuffs two bags per cycle.

Depending on the number of volunteers (and available space)  you can use now multiple of these pipelines in parallel. For SC15 in Austin, three pipelines were used (as can be seen in the picture).

Result: 5,500 conference bags stuffed in less than 4 hours by about 40 people!