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IEEE Hosts Successful Cluster 2009 Conference

Sept. 13 -- The IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2009) took place Aug. 31-Sept. 4 in New Orleans' historic French Quarter, attracting more than 200 participants, including a mix of experienced cluster computing experts and relative newcomers.

IEEE Cluster is the premier international conference on cluster computing, focusing on groundbreaking research into 21st-century cyberinfrastructure, including hardware, software, data analysis and storage, networking and applications. The IEEE Cluster series started in 1999, and information about previous events can be found online at http://www.clustercomp.org.

Cluster 2009 featured eight tutorials, four workshops, a poster session with 20 poster submissions, 48 technical papers and an exhibition area. These sessions covered a wide range of topics, including parallel and distributed computing, performance optimization, high-performance computing research applications and programming.

The Cluster Conference included keynote speakers John Gustafson of Intel, David Kirk of NVIDIA and Satoshi Matsuoka of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and plenary speeches from David Jackson of Adaptive Computing, Dhabaleshwar K. (DK) Panda of the Ohio State University, and Ron Minnich of Sandia National Laboratories.

Additionally, Cluster included four panels, chaired by Amy Apon of the University of Arkansas, Pete Beckman of Argonne National Laboratory, George Jones of Dell, and Gabrielle Allen of LSU.

The Cluster 2009 organizers received a nearly $50,000 grant award from the National Science Foundation that covered registration and lodging costs for 75 students to attend the conference. Activities particularly aimed at students included eight tutorials held on Monday and Friday, and a panel on Careers in Cluster Computing held on Thursday. The presence of the students brought a new level of excitement to the conference. As Program Chair Thomas Sterling said, "the students are the future of the conference and of the field."

Cluster 2009 sponsors included IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society, NSF, CCT, the Computation Institute at University of Chicago, Microsoft, Dell, QLogic, and Platform. Microsoft, Dell, QLogic, and Platform also were exhibitors at the conference.

Daniel S. Katz, senior computational scientist with the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, was general chair for the conference, and is the steering committee chair for the conference series. Katz previously was a professor in the LSU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and served as head of the CCT's Cyberinfrastructure Development division. Thomas Sterling, CCT and LSU Department of Computer Science, was Cluster 2009 program chair.

"Cluster 2009 attendees are now looking forward to the next event in the series, Cluster 2010, to be held in Crete in September 2010," according to Katz. "In particular, the students are particularly excited and hope that sponsorship of their participation can be found once again."

For more information, visit http://www.cluster2009.org.