I’ve always enjoyed a good road trip. There’s just something fun about jumping in the car, and heading to a far off location. As they say, half of the fun is just getting to your destination. My latest road trip brought me to Frankfurt for ISC High-Performance 2015.

Crossing all of Austria as well as the southern part of Germany, this trip proved to be no less exciting than the rest. Breaking down about 50 km from Frankfurt due to a dead battery, I was fortunate enough to meet a local family who helped to boost my car so that I could make it in time for the show. Luckily I had some craft beer to reward them for their troubles. Of course, part of the excitement this time was the fabled Autobahns of Germany. Here I could get up to some decent speeds - legally :)

Refreshments are always needed on long trips…

Frankfurt too had some interesting surprises in store - including the interesting culinary treat Handkäse mit Musik, which is a sour milk cheese served with onions. I’ll let you read what the Musik part is all about. There too is the infamous Apfelsaftschorle which I constantly mistook for beer at the ISC High-Performance venue. Such is life :)

For me, where the rubber hit the road was the ISC High-Performance event. The IBM booth (928) featured a refreshing bright yellow colour scheme, like the dawning of a new era of High-Performance Computing built on Data Centric Systemsand OpenPOWER. In terms of demos, the IBM booth featured a number of live and static demos including:

• OpenPOWER HPC Server and Cirrascale GPU Developer System
• IBM High Performance Services for HPC
• IBM Data Engine for Analytics
• IBM Watson tranSMART Transational Medicine Solution
• Pluto (astrophysics hydrodynamics/magneto-hydrodynamics) running live on Power8 + GPU
• OpenFOAM (CFD)
• High Performance Storage System (HPSS)

The OpenPOWER hardware that was on the show floor attracted a lot of attention. Many people were impressed to behold the two Power8 systems which included technology from OpenPOWER members Mellanox and NVIDIA. You may have read about my interest in Power and ARM based systems in some of my earlier blogs.

Being part of the IBM Platform Computing marketing team, I could frequently be found at the IBM High Performance Services for HPC demo point. Here we demonstrated our turnkey cloud solution for HPC workloads built in top of the IBM SoftLayer cloud and featuring both IBM Platform LSF & Platform Symphony workload management options. The demo leveraged the work done by MINES ParisTech and Transvalor to provide CFD services to French industry. You can read more about how MINES ParisTech and Transvalor leverage the IBM solutions for HPC here.

ISC also offered us the opportunity to showcase the IBM Platform LSF family of products interactive conceptual demo to passersby. Here users could learn that the Platform LSF family is not simply about workload management. For example, Platform Process Manager and Platform Application Center, two add-on products for Platform LSF help to boost user productivity through ease of use and simplification.

So what’s next? Toronto to Austin road trip for SC15? Yeah, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

See y’all in Texas!