From Understanding the Health of Ourselves to the Health of our Planet, SC09 Masterworks Program to Present Compelling Lineup of Experts

From Internet searches to social networking, sustainability to bio-computing, the Masterworks program at the SC09 conference will address some of the biggest, greenest and fast-growing challenges in the field of high performance computing. SC09, the 22^nd meeting of the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analytics, will be held November 14-20, 2009 in Portland.

Masterworks consists of invited presentations that highlight innovative ways of applying high performance computing, networking, and storage technologies to the world's most challenging problems.

One of the highlights of this year’s Masterworks is a Thursday, November 19 session featuring speakers from Google and Facebook, who will focus on some of the world’s largest, most complicated and most relentlessly demanding computer architectures. While these systems won’t be found on the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers, they are redefining the typical notion of a data center as they provide web services to hundreds of millions of users. The two talks will cover the challenge of producing immediate turnaround with no downtime at this extraordinary scale in a cost-effective manner.

Other Masterworks sessions will focus on the SC09 thrust areas, with two sessions on Sustainability and several on Bio-Computing. “This year’s Masterworks lineup perfectly conveys our ‘Computing for a Changing World’ theme and how this is also changing our view of high performance computing,” said Wilfred Pinfold, general chair of the SC09 conference and director, Extreme Scale Programs at Intel.

Among the areas to be addressed by Masterworks speakers are energy, global climate change, and how computing is improving our understanding of human health and medicine.

For example, many solutions to our energy challenges rely on complicated modeling processes that require supercomputing. The SC09 Masterworks presentations will explore seismic analysis for finding petroleum, oil reservoir modeling, and the vital role HPC is playing in meeting the government’s goal of having wind power generation supply 20 percent of U.S. energy needs by the year 2030.

High performance computing has initiated a race to achieve a predictive, systems-level understanding of complex biological systems and the SC09 Masterworks speakers will present some of the most exciting results in this fascinating area. One session will explain how molecular simulation is helping to fight Alzheimer’s Disease and answer a global “911” call by shaping a pharmacological strategy against the swine flu virus.

A Masterworks session on Wednesday afternoon, “How much does your doctor rely on supercomputing for your treatment?” will cover HPC in Modern Medicine, examining transformative efforts in adopting Grid technology to healthcare as well as applying HPC-level simulation to surgical decisions.

For more information on these and other SC09 Masterworks sessions visit http://sc09.supercomputing.org/?pg=masterworks.html.

The SC09 exhibition hall will feature more than 275 participating organizations as exhibitors, covering 255,000 sq. ft. of floor space, and an expected 11,000 attendees at the Oregon Convention Center.

About SC09

SC09, sponsored by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society, offers a complete technical education program and exhibition to showcase the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. This premier international conference includes a globally attended technical program, workshops, tutorials, an exhibit area, demonstrations and hands-on learning. The SC conference series is among Tradeshow Week magazine's Top 200 events. For more information on SC09, please visit http://sc09.supercomputing.org/.

SC09
Communications Chair
Mike Bernhardt, 503-804-1714
mike@teamlibra.com