IEEE Hot Interconnects 2015 (aka. HOTI’15) is around the corner. Early registration ends on July 31st! As usual, in Silicon Valley, where the heart of the interconnects industry beats lively. Following it’s 23 years tradition of revealing new interconnect technologies, HOTI’15 will not fall short. New HPC and datacenter network technologies such as Intel’s OmniPath and Bull’s Exascale Interconnect (BXI) will be presented at this year’s conference. Followed by a heated panel where members of industry and laboratories fight for their favorite technologies. Will Ethernet and InfiniBand clash with Intel’s and Bull’s new technologies? Will InfiniBand continue to shine? The future is unclear but the discussions will add to our understanding.

This year’s location is the historic Oracle Agnews Campus, Santa Clara, California. Hot Interconnects (HotI) is the premier international forum for researchers and developers of state- of-the-art hardware and software architectures and implementations for interconnection networks of all scales, ranging from multi-core on-chip interconnects to those within systems, clusters, data centers, and clouds. This yearly conference is attended by leaders in industry and academia, creating a wealth of opportunities to interact with individuals at the forefront of this field.

In addition to novel network technologies and hot discussions, this year’s Hot Interconnects features keynotes from Oracle’s Vice President of Hardware Development Rick Heatherington, and David Meyer, the CTO and Chief Scientist of Brocade Communications. There will be a great lineup of exciting talks, e.g., Facebook will discuss their efforts in interconnects and VMWare will talk about Network Function Virtualization (NFV).

There will be four technical paper sessions covering the cutting edge in interconnect research and development on cross-cutting issues spanning computer systems, networking technologies, and communication protocols for high-performance interconnection
networks. This conference is directed particularly at new and exciting technology and product innovations in these areas.

In addition, there will be four information-loaded tutorials on Big Data processing; advanced flow- and congestion control; ONOS, an open source SDN network operating system; and software-defined wide-area networking. These will provide in-depth coverage of latest industry developments and standards. Use them to get up to speed in the quickly changing networking field!

All this makes IEEE Hot Interconnects the hub for converging datacenter, HPC, and Big Data networking. An event that cannot be missed! The early registration closes in less than two weeks! See you in Santa Clara in August!

Visit http://www.hoti.org for details!

This year, I decided to combine several conferences and meetings into a single big trip combined with visits to interesting institutions on the way. This turned out to be one of my more stressful experiences (I feel like I didn’t sleep at all and need a long vacation now 🙂 ). But it was a really great experience and I can recommend it to anyone! Thanks to all the great friends who offered beds along the way :-).

The trip in numbers:

• duration: 5 weeks
• presentations: 20 (invited talks, conference talks, meeting presentations)
• driven distance: 5978 km (3714 miles)
• visited states (by car): CA, OR, NV, GA, TN, IN, KY, IL

An overview

Secret tip in Oregon: Ermie Walter’s Boat Launch

The big gap in the middle was a flight with Spirit airlines, one of my worst airline experiences (that I cannot recommend to anyone, it was very cheap but also really bad).

This was probably my most efficient trip (cost- and time-wise) so far. On the way were two major conferences (ACM ICS and ACM HPDC/FCRC) which were attended by more SPCL members giving six paper talks at these venues (making it a total of 26 SPCL presentations in these weeks).