Salt Lake City hosted the SC12 supercomputing conference on November 10 – 16, 2012 at the Salt Palace Convention Center. The international conference, which focused on high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, brought in approximately 10,000 participants from at least 50 countries.
Bringing together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and managers, SC is the forum for demonstrating how these developments are driving new ideas, discoveries and industries, featuring the latest scientific and technical innovations from around the world.
Representatives from the Utah Broadband Project in the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development, the University of Utah, Utah State University, and Brigham Young University, partnered to host booths highlighting Utah’s technology history, robust broadband infrastructure, and academic research. The conference was a great opportunity to introduce Utah’s business-friendly environment, talented workforce, academic research, and infrastructure to visiting businesses.
The Salt Palace Convention Center’s technical capabilities and space were decisive factors in the selection process. The communications and power infrastructure in Salt Lake City allowed the conference to be set up with greater ease and less expense than other competing destinations.
The convention center utilized over 150,000 square feet of contiguous exhibitor space, which was the largest exhibit hall in conference history. To prepare for the conference, SCinet, which is the network created for the conference each year, partnered with the Utah Education Network to install an additional 80 miles of fiber optic cable in and around the convention center.
By connecting the conference to Utah’s extensive broadband infrastructure, SCinet delivered nearly 800 Gbps in bandwidth, which is fast enough to transfer the entire electronic content of the Library of Congress in about 2 minutes. Exhibitors were able to showcase the revolutionary high-performance computing applications and networking experiments that are the hallmark of SC. The conference will return to Salt Lake City in 2016.