by Lynda Lester
S an Diego was hazy and cool, temperatures in the low 60s. Sleek glass towers lined the streets and the city was pastel clean. Yachts with names like Free Spirit, Sea Lynx, and Crown Jewel were moored in the marina behind the Convention Center. It was a calm place, bayside--a pleasant place, a beautiful place, almost one could say a vacation place, with picturesque pelicans and seagulls wheeling overhead.Inside, all hell was breaking loose. By the tens and hundreds and thousands, people were pouring into the cavernous exhibition hall to set up their booths for Supercomputing '95. And it was chaos.
"I walked into the Convention Center and there were 6,000 things going on," says SCD Digital Information Group head Greg McArthur, who arrived early with other SCD staff to prepare the NCAR booths. "It was noisy. It looked like havoc; it was havoc. There were propane-powered forklifts picking up carpets and moving crates, and they were all beeping; there was so much beeping, you didn't know if you were going to get hit or not. The only way you could tell where your booth was supposed to be was by following the masking tape on the floor.
"People were hanging signs, people were walking around with cell phones and walkie talkies and blinkie buttons. The hall lights were coming up and down, with a voice booming out of the PA: 'ATTENTION EXHIBITORS, THE LIGHTS WILL BE OFF FOR THE NEXT 40 MINUTES'--you're trying to set up your booth and it's like, 'Gee, thanks!'"
John Sloan, head of the SCD High-Performance Systems Section, concurs. "When we arrived Saturday morning it was complete and glorious pandemonium. There were hundreds of people working frenziedly to get everything up by Monday, and shipping crates littered the floor--big crates, automobile-sized crates. You had to pick your way around equipment cables and power tools, and you couldn't walk the same path twice--things were in such state of flux that a given path from point A to point B wouldn't exist a second time. I saw a guy get trapped while standing in one place--the floor crew moved crates and he found himself surrounded. He had to climb over a pile of obstacles to get out."
As for the wiring,
Sloan says, "there had to be miles of orange fiber cables hanging on
elastic cords from the ceiling hundreds of feet above the hall. It
looked like a rainforest, but instead of vines, there were fiber
cables. If you wanted a network connection, someone would walk by on a
catwalk overhead and put a red blinking light on a fiber cable; another
person on the ground with a telescoping aluminum pole would reach up
and pull the fiber down for you and hook it to up. You had several
choices: plain old Ethernet over fiber, ATM over fiber, serial HIPPI
over fiber, FDDI over fiber--they were all being used everywhere."
Sloan describes the Network Operations Center: "The NOC booth was about an acre of glassed-in enclosure full to the brim with network engineers and equipment. All you could see were cables connecting the hardware in the racks--there were servers, workstations, routers, bridges, one of everything that had to do with networking, stuck into that room. You could think of it like a brain--it was the nerve center of the entire conference, netwise."
Sloan on the main power feed: "In the center of floor was the main feed from a transformer below the Convention Center; it was where the power came up to the junction boxes that fed all the equipment on the floor. I saw electrical cables coming up that were as thick as a person's thigh; they were buried in sand, with fire extinguishers surrounding them. The crew had put up a yellow metal fence to keep people from walking into the junction boxes and being fried instantly."
"At some point," says McArthur, "you're standing there in the middle of all this thinking, 'How in world can this ever come together in a day and half?' But it does. On Monday afternoon they kick you out for three hours so they can speed-vacuum the aisle and clean the place up. Then before you know it--bingo, it's showtime!"
Call it impossible, call it supernatural--but at the preordained stroke of six on the opening night of Supercomputing '95, the hall was ready. Columns, arches, walls, mazes, and 40-foot pillars existed where there had been a vast concrete emptiness days before. Rotating holograms, interactive VR displays, ambient music, future-shock animations, high-performance computing systems, and a squadron of fighter jets practicing takeoffs and landings--no, that came later--spun up as a throng of media persons and SC registrants poured through the gates.
And I heard a small voice within say: "Let the wild rumpus start!"
Sloan: "It's a competition each year to outdo each other on booths; this year was no exception. Especially interesting was the Cray Research exhibit, which had a talking robot and a 3-D display of a woman's head delivering a lecture: no matter where you were, she'd be looking at you. The IBM exhibit had two 8-by-12-foot walls, each wall with a matrix of 12 large-screen TVs. During the conference the monitors ran IBM information, but beforehand they were running ESPN, and we all got to watch sports on large-screen TV."
Sun, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, Thinking Machines, and dozens of other vendors had impressive industry exhibits. Academia, too, was there in full force, plus the National Science Foundation metacenters--in total, a bewildering array of supercomputing and communications technology filling the hall to capacity.
For the next three days, exhibitors experienced high intensity levels, information overload, missed meals, and aching feet.
And it came to pass that by Thursday afternoon, everyone was wasted.At four p.m., a booming voice came over the PA: "THE EXHIBITION HALL IS NOW CLOSED. ALL VISITORS PROCEED TO THE NEAREST EXIT."
"A shout went up, wild cheers echoed through the hall," says Sally Haerer, head of SCD's Technical Support and Development Section. "T-shirts and jeans came out from under the tables, suits and ties disappeared in a minute. All the boxes and trash and junk that had been stored under the tables got pulled onto the floor. The forklifts came back and started beeping, and people were crawling around on their hands and knees undoing cables. We all wanted out.
"There was one poor woman still visiting our booth when the announcement was made--she was just blown away at how fast we destroyed everything. It was a rampage."
"The thing that strikes me about Supercomputing," says John Sloan, "is that for the span of four days, it's one of the biggest and best networked computer centers in the world. Computers range from PCs and Macs to workstations to high-end servers to CRAY J9 supercomputers--all running on the floor, all networked. It's remarkable."The second thing is that not only is it one of the largest computing centers in the world, but it's put together in a few days from nothing but bare concrete. People come in and bring the computers and network up in just a few days. When they open the doors at 6 p.m. Monday night, everything looks pristine--there's carpet in place everywhere, and it seems as if it's always been that way. Then it's all torn down in one day to make room for the next convention."
Undoubtedly an adventure. Indeed, Sloan says, "Working as I did at the conference was such a positive experience that I intend to volunteer to do so next year."