The 2009 Cray User Group (CUG) Technical Conference - “Compute the Future” was hosted by the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS). James White (Trey), ORNL was this year’s Local Arrangements Chair (LAC) and his invaluable assistant Sherry Hempfling was our Local Arrangements Coordinator. Trey and Sherry did a fabulous job in selecting a truly wonderful conference venue; the beautiful Omni Hotel at the world-famous CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). The Omni hotel was within easy walking distance of a wide variety of restaurants and attractions. From the hotel we had a fantastic view overlooking Centennial Olympic Park and the Atlanta skyline.

 

This year’s CUG once again proved to be another exceptional conference. We received fantastic support from Cray, with over 35 people (executives, technical personal, and liaisons) on hand throughout the week. The Atlanta CUG ran four full days (mainly three tracks wide) and consisted of nearly 80 speaker presentations. Excellent keynote talks were provided by James Hack, Director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL and Thomas Schulthess the Director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). Buddy Bland, Director of the Leadership Computing Facility (ORNL), also provided a great talk on Jaguar, the most powerful Cray system in the world. The Best Paper award, a CUG first, went to “A Generalized Framework for Auto-tuning Stencil Computations”; authors Shoaib Kamil, Cy Chan, Samuel Williams, Leonid Oliker, John Shalf, Mark Howison, E. Wes Bethel, and Prabhat. The majority of conference papers have already been posted to the CUG web site; full proceedings will be distributed on CD to all the attendees shortly.

 

The CUG Board of Directors held an “Open Discussion” session late Monday to address any questions from the membership. Key items of concern were declining membership (due to the formation of so many super-sites), financial status of the organization, and the additional membership classification (Associate Site) that was added to the By-Laws last year. The Board, along with Cray, continues to work hard to increase the membership; however, until the number of Cray sites grows, it will be difficult to increase our numbers. The recent addition of Cray Vendors as sponsors has significantly helped to offset some of the conference costs and has kept the conference budget in the black. Overall, between ongoing yearly expenses and the annual CUG conference, financial health of the organization is good. With regards to the new CUG membership category, everyone attending seemed to be in agreement that it’s a good thing and to let the By-Law change stand. The CUG Membership Committee will now start accepting applications for Associate Site review.

 

The CUG elections were to be held during the business meeting session of the conference on Wednesday. Unfortunately, with some of the candidates withdrawing just prior to the start of the conference; we were left with exactly three candidates for the three open positions -- victory was declared through acclamation. Jim Rogers (ORNL) has stepped in to the CUG Treasurer role, Mike Ashworth (HPCX Consortium) retained his position as Director-at-Large, and Mark Fahey (ORNL) moved in to the remaining Director-at-Large position.

 

I’d like to express my thanks to Trey White, Sherry Hempfling, and the wonderful staff from ORNL for all their hard work in preparing and hosting the 2009 Atlanta Conference. I’m also grateful to the CUG Program Committee, ToolBox Management (BobWinget), and all the volunteers who did a great job to keep things running smoothly throughout the entire event. It was a real pleasure working with everyone who was involved with the 2009 conference; their professionalism, dedication to details and friendly attitude contributed greatly to the overall success of the CUG Technical conference. Lastly, I’d also like to recognize our CUG conference sponsors:

• Elite – Cray Inc.
• Platinum – Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
• Gold - DataDirect Networks and LSI
• Silver- Altair, Cluster Resources, PGI, Platform Computing, and TotalView