Report from the President

The 2008 Cray User Group (CUG) Technical Conference - “Crossing the Boundaries” was hosted by CSC, The Finnish IT Center of Science, at the Marina Congress Center in Helsinki, Finland. Ville Savolainen (Development Manager, Software Engineering CSC) and Kimmo Koski (Director of CSC) were this year’s conference Local Arrangements Coordinators (LAC).

This Helsinki conference signified two major milestones in CUG history; not only did it mark the 30th year since the inception of the Cray User Group, but it was also the 50th CUG meeting.

This 2008 CUG program ran four full days (mainly three tracks wide) and consisted of over 70 presentations.

•Cray Inc. provided another year of fantastic support with over 35 people (executives, technical personal, and liaisons) on hand throughout the week.

•The membership looked forward to the “1 on 100 (or more)” session with Pete Ungaro, Cray Inc. CEO & President. There were no disappointments, in fact we exceeded the allotted 60 minute time slot and continued well into the break with questions for Pete.

•The two Keynote presentations, “Computers Crunching Lipids – From Cell Membranes to Lipoproteins” by Professor Ilpo Vattulainen (Leader of the Biological Physics & Soft Matter Group, Tampere University of Technology) and “Dark Energy – A Mystery?” by Kari Enqvist (Professor of Cosmology, University of Helsinki & Theory Program Director Helsinki Institute of Physics) were well received.

•Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC, did an excellent job with his presentation, “Petaflop Computing in the European HPC Ecosystem”, which fit nicely with the conference theme.

•The tutorials, technical presentations, SIG meetings, and BOFs seem to meet with everyone’s expectation. The only real complaint was that multiple tracks prevented people from hearing all of the talks they wanted to, which implies that we had a significant number of worthwhile presentations.

•Cray User Group (CUG) Conference Services did a nice job in managing the CUG office and in helping to keep things running smoothly. Many of the conference proceedings are already posted onto the CUG web site, the full proceedings will be distributed on CD to attendees shortly.

•Election Results: David Gigrich (BOEING) and Jim Kasdorf (PITTSCC) retained their positions as CUG President and Secretary, respectively. Nickolas Cardo (NERSC) succeeded John Noe (SANDIA) as CUG VP and Liam Forbes (ARSC) was elected to the open Director-at-Large position. The proposed CUG Bylaw modifications, to allow for an additional membership classification (Associate Site), were narrowly approved. Just prior to the vote, the membership went through an intense round of discussion on how Associate Sites might effect the future control and direction of the organization. In the post-conference Board meeting it was determined that the Membership Committee would not process any Associate Site membership applications until after the Board had a chance to solicit input from the site delegates.

•Conference venue selection worked out extremely well; the room sizes, acoustics, and wireless were all great, and having the hotel just across the street was another plus.

•The Cray Social set a new height for the Tuesday evening event -- the atmosphere, food selection, and ability to interact could not have been better. Let’s not forget that fantastic CUG 30th anniversary cake. The CUG membership and their guests were very pleased and truly appreciated being able to sample such a variety of Finnish dishes.

•The CUG Night Out was wonderful to say the least. The scenic boat ride to the restaurant was relaxing. The restaurant was fabulous in all respects -- great ambiance, exceptionally good food and the piano playing by Maija was marvelous. I personally think most will remember this night for some time, especially the first time CUG attendees.

•Director Resignation: At the Thursday Board meeting following the close of the conference; Barbara Horner-Miller announced she had other interests to pursue and was resigning from her post as Past President. Since this Director-at-Large position is not an elected one, the CUG Board will need to assign someone to that role. Barbara has held several positions during her many years with CUG and has been an invaluable contributor to the organization -- she will be missed. We thank her for her long-standing commitment to CUG and wish her well.

I’d like to express my thanks to Ville and his wonderful CSC team for all their hard work in preparing and hosting the 2008 Helsinki Conference. In addition, my thanks go out to the Program Committee and Cray for their continued outstanding support. It was a real pleasure working with everyone who was involved with the 2008 conference; their professionalism, dedication to details and friendly attitude contributed greatly to the overall success of another CUG Technical conference. I can’t thank everyone enough for all their help and I’m already looking forward to next year’s conference.

CUG 2009 will be held May 4-7, 2009 at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. We are pleased to have the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oakridge National Laboratory host this technically packed event. The theme for the 2009 conference is “Compute the Future”, because that is exactly what many Cray users do -- They compute to know now, because they should not or must not wait.

I look forward to seeing you at the May 2009 conference in Atlanta.

David J. Gigrich
CUG President
The Boeing Company