ISC High Performance (ISC) 2018 took place earlier this week in beautiful Frankfurt, Germany. One of my favorites, the event brought together an impressive 3,500 attendees, 450 speakers and 150 exhibits. Addressing supercomputing, networking and storage, the conference showcased expert speakers, tutorials, workshops, and exhibits targeted at the global HPC community. Between customer meetings, conference sessions, and catching up with industry peers, we gathered our favorite moments and reflections on the show below.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and HPC for the cloud were overarching themes for the event, and these topics were addressed in many sessions. Conference keynote speaker Dr. Maria Girone, CERN openlab CTO, was an absolute favorite of the week. Dr. Girone discussed the unique needs and future challenges of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and data center. Because of the wide breadth of variables they measure – conditions in the LHC range from millions of times hotter than the sun to almost absolute zero – they collect 1 PB of data per second that has to be filtered and then reconstructed in real time during LHC experiments. Over the next decade, CERN estimates that it will increase compute capacity demand by 50 to 100 times as they prepare to build the next particle accelerator, the “High-Luminosity” LHC.

To make things even more exciting, the new TOP500 list of Supercomputer sites was published at ISC. Oak Ridge National Laboratory displaced China’s Sunway TaihuLight to take the number one spot in the world. Oak Ridge’s new supercomputer, named Summit, boasts 122.30 petaflops!