This year’s SC10 conference was, as expected, jam-packed with sessions, exhibits and notable people from the HPC community—all gathered in a city that left plenty of room for exploring and fun.

While we were able to cover the event live in New Orleans, there were a few items of interest that didn’t make it to the special coverage section, in part due to the fact that when you’re at SC, even if you have a lot of writing and uploading of video and images to do, there’s too much going on to let it sink in all at once.

For instance, this great question and answer session with IDC’s Earl Joseph and Addison Snell from Intersect360 never made it into our headlines, even if it is definitely worth listening to. Here the two are asked questions about the interconnect market (and the role of custom interconnects), the impact of stimulus funding on HPC growth, China and its competitive position, and European versus United States initiatives in HPC.

Northrop Grumman has partnered with Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers in Montana to form the M.O.R.E. POWER initiative, which is set to use the Butte-based center’s on-demand facilities to help determine the “most efficient and productive networks of wind and solar farms for renewable energy farms.” Outside of this goal, those involved with the project will try to see if they can reduce the amount of capital required for starting and operating wind farm networks and improve ROI for those that are built.

As Northrop Grumman noted in a release, “Renewable energy generation experiences variability of power generation, which presents integration challenges for the electric grid. M.O.R.E. POWER lowers the cost of operations by identifying an optimized network of farm locations, which minimizes intermittency through site diversity, while still maximizing saleable energy.”

Here’s a little more on this. I should note that during our conversation, Randy didn’t mean to say Maui Supercomputing Centers but since I’m a chick, if I edited and over-dubbed in my own voice over that it would sound odd, so please note that correction.

Testing the Blue Waters

Here is a brief update on what’s going on at NCSA and the Blue Waters project from a couple of leading figures at both. Blue Waters is set to make some news in the coming years as development continues; currently teams are working on converting applications to reach peak high performance—more on this coming soon.

Checking in with Cray

An overview of what’s new at Cray; has nothing to do with cloud but always worth checking in with standard HPC whenever we can.

Blue Gene, iDataPlex, Clouds and IBM at SC10

There was something about this that felt like a fair or circus; our attention was being diverted to any number of ongoing developments at IBM. While this video was filmed during the press tour before the show opened and exhibitors were only given a few minutes, IBM pushed just about everything to the forefront and gave a rambling overview of their offerings. Cloud was touched on, but only briefly in a, “yeah, we’ve got that” kind of way.

Juniper Networks

Routing switching and security company Juniper Networks gives a quick introduction during the press tour; this is a great video simply because of the display here—there’s nothing like actually seeing installations and SC provides a prime opportunity.

We hope to bring you even more next year as we expect there to be more in the way of clouds at the event in Seattle.

We want to thank the unexpectedly large number of you who came over to HPCwire/HPC in the Cloud booth to chat with us as well. It’s great to meet readers.

See you next year!