Tonight they opened the doors to the SC|06 exhibition here in Tampa. And the Sun booth is quite large this time. Lots of room to meet people and give demos.

We're all pretty tired from a full weekend of meetings at the HPC Consortium. The Sun Studio team will be here on the floor over the next couple of days.

Already I've met a couple of old-timers from the CDC/Cray supercomputer days in the 70's. These shows are part "homecomings" for many of us who've been in the scientific/technical computing world most of our lives.

I took a quick tour around the floor, and it's overwhelming as usual. As always, the most interesting booths are those from the national laboratories and universities showing their latest research projects in computational science. I hope to be able to spend some of my spare time on the floor investigating their exhibits. Its like the old high school science fairs, but on a massive scale. (Do they still do science fairs in high school?)

For the Sun Studio team, the job will be getting the word out about our compilers and tools. We're handing out literature and DVD's. And there are "pods" for Solaris, ClusterTools/OpenMPI, Sun Visualization Software, Sun Services, and more from our partners, including an incredible exhibit of facial and brainwave recognition systems from U. of Houston.

Hope to have more pictures tomorrow.