In a word.... WOW!

This is Grid Goddess' first Supercomputing Conference -- and first of all I want to say WOW! 9,707 attendees, half a terabit of network connectivity and all the vendors you'd ever want to talk to (265) are here. There are still no lines at the Ladies' room, but I see few more skirts this time. I went to Bill Gates' keynote speech yesterday. Even though I've been quoted as saying I would leave computing before I would go back to supporting a Microsoft environment, what he proposed as a front end for scientific computing is quite nice. If Microsoft really does embrace heterogeneity as Bill promised in his speech, this could bring scientific computing to a whole new level. I won't summarize his speech... you can listen to it here.