Keyes and colleagues take part in historic ISC

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KAUST Professor David Keyes, director of the KAUST Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC) and professor of applied mathematics and computational science, chaired this year's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC). The ISC, which takes place in Frankfurt, Germany every June, is where the world's supercomputers are re-ranked for computational power, power efficiency, and performance on various scientific benchmarks.

Given that the world is running virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ISC 2020 organizing committee, led by Keyes, set a precedent for the world's longest-running supercomputing conference. The event was fully digital, with both live-streamed and pre-recorded events.

This year's event also witnessed a record registration of 4,735 specialists in high-performance computing (HPC).

"This demonstrates a comfortable migration of the computational community to the internet, which, in fact, is its own invention!" said Keyes. "Live conferences in which vendor exhibits are a critical part, such as ISC High Performance cannot be virtualized and will always have a niche. However, it seemed opportunistic in this year of the pandemic pause to not simply maintain a brand for existing participants but stake out a brand for new participants. This was part of our objective for Digital ISC 2020, and it is a very significant mandate, indeed!"

The event gathered supercomputing experts from around the world to the opening award ceremony where the new Japanese supercomputer "Fugaku" (the Japanese name for Mount Fuji) took honors atop the TOP500, the Green500, the Graph 500, and the HPCG lists.

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