Not good

Rich B at InsideHPC.com posts about the national labs exit from floorspace at SC12. The claim is due to budget cuts, but the GSA scandal and its fallout likely have a higher precedence to the upper echelon of decision makers. Which if you think about it, only a minute amount, you realize is the very definition of the cliche to cut ones nose off to spite their face. To any decision makers out there, this is the wrong thing to do. Seriously wrong. The national labs, DoE/DoD/… ALL have much to share and contribute to HPC. But more than that, if you only follow back a few years to the council on competitiveness reports on the value of HPC to our competitiveness in the global marketspace, you’d see that at a very base level, HPC is critical to our advantages. These people are critical to HPC. Here’s a simple offer we are willing to make. Let them come to the show and we’d be happy to let them share a portion of our booth with us (not all of them, our booth isn’t that big). Obviously this would have no endorsement or other implications whatsoever on their part to us; this offer is basically to help our colleagues out by giving them a way to satisfy the letter and spirit of their requirements, while still attending and presenting. Maybe Rich B could put out a call to other companies willing to donate space/power/stands/etc. again, without any endorsement/etc. for using the space. With enough companies contributing space, I bet we’d be able to work out presentation space for all their work. We could rig up a map/app at insidehpc.com to direct folks. Hey, two weeks to go, a hard very non-optimal situation, focus upon getting something to work rather than being pretty. Yes the GSA has had its excesses and it needs to be fixed (well, eliminated, but that’s a whole different story). Making the folks who’ve contributed so much to our industry, and the preeminent industry meeting suffer because of the failures of a few isn’t really that great of a route. There’s no upside, there’s no reduction in risk. There’s only a downside.