The fall has always been the busy season in the high-tech industry for conferences and tradeshows and despite the recession, 2009 is continuing the tradition. Time to pack the bags, get on airplanes and get away from the office to spend high quality time meeting customers, partners and acquaintances from the industry.

Acceleware started the season last week at NVIDIA’s GPU Tech Conference. This conference broke away from the NVISION conference that incorporated all things NVIDIA including gamer parties, all night Rock Band marathons and sprouted into its own business focused event. With this more narrow focus, Acceleware even became a sponsor of the event, I think mainly for better access to drink tickets. According to NVIDIA, the conference sold out 2 weeks before opening and the atmosphere was definitely buzzing with lots of cool new technologies to show off.

Ryan Schneider and Michal Okoniewski both had 2 different presentations at the conference. Ryan presented on Reverse Time Migration with GPUs and was also on a panel discussion. Michal gave a standing room only presentation on what Acceleware is doing with Linear Algebra and a corporate overview presentation in the Emerging Companies section of the conference. Apparently these presentations will be available on NVIDIA's website in the near future. Overall this conference demonstrated a dramatic increase in the interest level of GPU computing and the steady stream of corporate and researcher types to our booth was really inspiring.

Next up is SEG Houston 2009 at the end of October where the Acceleware booth #2285 will be featuring our latest TTI enabled Reverse Time Migration solution. SEG is a first-class event but definitely can he hard on the liver with multiple opportunities for free drinks doled out by the big vendors and the SEG itself. Last year there were some innovative booths serving fresh fruit smoothies to counteract the bad habits. The Acceleware RTM demo will also be featured in several other booths on the show floor including HP, Kelman, Tsunami and NVIDIA. You can catch Ryan Schneider doing the Acceleware song and dance live at the HP booth several times during the conference. This is Acceleware’s third year presenting at SEG, our third year partnering with HP and our second year with a booth as we continue to make inroads to the Oil and Gas market.

Finally to end off the season, Acceleware will once again be at SuperComputing, this year in Portland. I doubt it will be as warm as Austin was last year but it should be very exciting to see all the advances and upcoming trends. More on SuperComputing to come in a future blog.

Comments

Could you please give us an update about the different trade-shows Acceleware hs been attending? This blog is actually the most useful tool to keep track of the different shows the company is attending.

# Posted By john | 10/21/09 8:37 AM

Hi John,

Thanks a lot for your comment! After SEG which starts October 25th we have one more trade show coming up: Supercomputing in Portland, Oregon (Nov. 14th - 20th).

Find out more here:
www.acceleware.com/events

# Posted By admin | 10/23/09 9:45 AM

Hi,

I think my question was misunderstood so I'll provide a question outline which might interest other readers.

What is the trend in terms of forums attended compared to let's say October 2005?

Could you please describe the attendance behavior compared to previous years?

Do you see more people coming to your booth?

How would you describe the people's awareness about Acceleware?

Do you see emerging competing companies? What is their approach to massively parallel computing and how big is the "threat" for Acceleware?

I don't expect given names but on what you observe, do you see some companies which would be complementary to Acceleware's offerings?

Would Acceleware when reaching a sufficient profit be candidate to acquire some of these companies?

Cheers!!

# Posted By john | 10/27/09 6:17 AM

Hi John,
I have threaded some answers to your questions into this text.

John: What is the trend in terms of forums attended compared to let's say October 2005? AXE: Acceleware is attending fewer shows than we did in the fall of 2007. The main reason is that we are finding many of our customers who come from separate markets (for example Electromagnetics and Seismic Processing) attending the same show like SuperComputing, since they have HPC responsibilities. This is a more efficient use of our resources.

------------------------------------------------
John: Could you please describe the attendance behavior compared to previous years?
AXE: The biggest difference is not having people come to our booth, look at the GPUs on display and say “what the heck is that”. Three or four years ago the idea of using GPUs for computing was definitely novel and not well understood. Now we do not even bother to show the hardware components at our booth since the vast majority of visitors understand and embrace the role of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment. I would say the tipping point of change for us occurred at SuperComputing 2008 in Austin where there were a large number of vendors displaying GPU solutions. The question of “why GPUs” disappeared for us at that conference and has never come back.

We just returned from SuperComputing 2009 in Portland and according to the show organizers (actually from the voice of God announcer on the show floor) it was a record year for attendance. It certainly seems that the HPC segment of the computing industry is doing well despite the recession.

John: Do you see more people coming to your booth?
AXE: We track leads instead of actual people attending the booth so it would be hard to say. Plus we are attending different conferences than we did 3 to 4 years ago so it is an apples to oranges comparison. Overall we have been very pleased with the traffic at tradeshows recently and the quality. I would say that many people we talk to at the booth are progressing in their plans to incorporate GPUs as part of their HPC strategy.

John: How would you describe the people's awareness about Acceleware?
AXE: Acceleware still has a very high level of visibility in the GPU computing world, thanks to our own efforts and the ongoing support from NVIDIA. However there are additional vendors now in this market compared to 3 or 4 years ago so the noise level has gone up. There are simply more trees in the GPU computing forest than in 2006 - 2007.

John: Do you see emerging competing companies? What is their approach to massively parallel computing and how big is the "threat" for Acceleware?
Axe: I would be worried if we did not see competitors in the market place, so the recent increase in the number of competitors and near-competitors is a positive sign. We have seen a few companies that “borrow” a bit from the Acceleware name but their markets are different than what we are tackling.

John: I don't expect given names but on what you observe, do you see some companies which would be complementary to Acceleware's offerings?
Axe: Yes :-) - Sorry but I just do not want to say much more than that other than the ecosystem around parallel computing and Compute GPUs is growing so we do see opportunities to engage in interesting discussions with other companies to jointly provide better solutions to the market are there.

John: Would Acceleware when reaching a sufficient profit be candidate to acquire some of these companies?
Axe: Obviously cannot offer any comment on that question, sorry.

Keep the questions coming.

# Posted By Rob Miller | 11/26/09 4:48 PM