SuperComputing 2011 was in Seattle this year, and the exhibition was open from November 14^th – November 17^th. This was a huge show, with an estimated 11,000 exhibitors, hardware vendors, HPC middleware vendors, system integrators, SuperComputing Center reps, HPC ISVs, and others bustling around the convention floor. Viewstream was excited to be at the nexus of the industry ecosystem, engaging with our clients and other industry leaders. Throughout the week, we talked with community members about HPC directions and how their marketing is being affected by the broadening of HPC and its cross-fertilization with Cloud and Big Data.

Lots of big industry announcements are made at the annual SC Conference, and this year’s was no exception. With Intel’s announcement of the MIC architecture and the Sandy Bridge e and x79 chipset, the release of NVIDIA’s Maximus technology that combines Tesla and Quadro, and Cray’s picking up of BlueWaters from IBM, there was no shortage of surprises.

One of the more exciting projects featured at the conference involved the work Microsoft has been doing testing the limits of its Windows Azure platform in the real world. As HPC continues integrating with more and more Cloud offerings, solutions like Windows Azure can help free researchers and other HPC end users from slow data return times and other compute limitations to allow them to produce some very exciting results. An example of this game-changing technology is the relationship between Microsoft and Baker Labs, a research lab at the University of Washington that leverages HPC in the Cloud with Windows Azure to help solve some of the smallest mysteries is modern medicine.

To learn more about this project, watch the video Viewstream produced that was featured at Microsoft’s SC11 booth: