More at SC2001
More conference going... exhibits and papers. Went to an IBM party and then a nice dinner with people from IBM and Myricom. Some photos of the show are up.
Most striking ideas from the conference so far... First, we all know Moore's Law (feature density increases lead to computer speed doubling every 18 months), but its network bandwidth corollary (network speed doubles every 9 months) is even wilder. The result is an order of magnitude difference in increase in 5 years. e.g. from 2001 to 2010 computers increase in speed by 60 times where networks will increase in speed by 4000 times. This has very interesting future system architecture implications. Second, HPC and other computing niches are dead... we will soon all use whatever systems are needed by webfarms 
I've heard that it's possible to get pretty good HPL results on a ethernet cluster (like at least 50% effiency) with some HPL.dat tuning. This is something I'll have to explore soon.... could get a lot more clusters into the top500 with it.