Supercomputing Conference A Glimpse Into Future Of Mainstream Computing

Supercomputers used to be a market unto themselves. In their time, giants such as IBM, Control Data Corporation (CDC), Evans & Sutherland (E&S), Silicon Graphics and Cray Computing ruled the supercomputing market. But with Moore's Law restricted to only scaling transistor count, scale-out has taken over a conference series that had epitomized scale-up. Because the nature of supercomputing has changed so much in the past two decades, the market has expanded into a much broader high-performance computing (HPC) market. At this year's SC16 conference, SGI made news by being purchased by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and the Cray booth looked a bit forlorn.