Successful Start for Supercomputing Conference

Computing Insight UK, held at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry during December, was hailed a great success by organisers the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Scientific Computing Department and Hartree Centre. As the UK’s newest supercomputing conference and exhibition, it attracted more than 200 delegates from all parts of Britain as well as 50 international exhibitors and sponsors.

“I believe this is the only UK conference that’s completely focused on High Performance Computing, Big Data Analytics and Cloud Computing,” said Dave Cable, one of the organisers from STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory. “It brings together technology providers in these markets with a community of expert users and people responsible for the procurement and running of systems, in an environment where they can easily network and share information.”

CIUK evolved from the Machine Evaluation Workshop, a technical workshop which ran for 25 years. Its original focus was entirely on academia and had a small number of exhibitors who would make available their systems for delegates to try out.

While the event attracted a solid base of clients from academia, for future years the organisers would like to see more commercial organisations taking advantage of this event, which can help to create partnerships and add value to businesses.

Colin Bridger from Mellanox Technologies, one of the event’s sponsors, said, “The conference is a great opportunity to meet all of our end-users in one place, and continue building the relationships with our partners…It’s been a tremendous success.”