Supercomputing booth/2013

Details

• Web site
• Dates: November 17-22, 2013
• Location: Denver, Colorado
• Booth nr: 1239
• Booth personnel: Balazs Konya, Christian Soettrup

Report

Participants

• Balazs Konya
• Christian Søttrup

SC13 general notes

According to the organizers this year exhibit was the largest ever during the 25 years of SC history. The more than 350 exhibitors occupied a huge, non-divided exhibit hall. A new (?) tendency was the large number of university/education institute promotional booths. SC13 looked like a huge higher educational promotional market. NorduGrid was not the only "Nordic" exhibitor, Trondheim (NTNU), Bergen (bldl.ii.uib.no), gridcore (a Goteborg cloud company:) were also from Scandinavia. Other related/familiar booth were the EGI, INFN, Swiss Supercomputing booth. Note that none of these previously strong grid players used the "G" word any longer. As always, there were some recent EU projects that felt that they should run a booth. These EU project boothes were large and looked pretty strange. Among the usual large industry vendors NVIDIA was a new vocal/aggressive kid on the block while Microsoft was hardly visible. As a new (?) trend, lots of storage vendor, both from the hardware and software layer were present. NSA also had a small booth :). Compared to my previous SC experiences, the exhibit floor was pretty crowded, lots of people were roaming around. Another new (?) trend was that many booth offered food and alcoholic drinks. The USB stick as a giwe-away has completely disappeared, various origami (like kangaroo, whales, so on) and coloring papers (for kids) were a big hit. Some big vendors required the visitors to listen to their lectures before they could collect the gadget :)

The NorduGrid booth

This year a new booth setup was tried. A large background poster printed on cloth material was hung over the ugly curtain. The middle of the poster was left empty for projection. The projector was placed on a small black drawer. The drawer we bought in Denver (100 USD) and it turned out to be very nice: the computer and all the cables could go inside while the projector was sitting nicely on the top. The large ugly table was moved to the side of the booth. To attract attention we placed the A-REX roll-up at the corner of the booth (according to the regulations it is not allowed but everybody else were doing the same). Setting up the booth was pretty easy and fast, most of the time was spent on trying to find and buy the drawer then assembling it :).

Material used

• background poster printed on cloth (3.2 x 1.3 meter large). Plastic rails, hooks and paper clips were used to hang the poster nicely.
• A-REX roll-up
• a drawer to place the projector on it (this was bought in Denver)
• two chairs and the usual big table (provided by Freeman)
• marketing cards with the A-REX picture and text "Lightweight and non-intrusive. The only dinosaur you want in your data center". 400 copies were printed and only 100 left by the end of the show.
• giveaway stuff: we used the leftover from the previous year (post it, ARC pens) and also bought from Amazon 180 plastic dino eggs with tiny dino inside. We squeezed a marketing card in each dino egg and placed the colorful eggs in a glass bowl.

budget

• booth fee: 100 USD
• travel cost for two people (17 kSEK? per person)
• booth personal registration (100 USD per person)
• car rental, extra furniture, tools, office material all paid in Denver: around 300 USD
• poster printing and design costs (done in Lund): appx. 4 ksek
• dino giweaways: 300 SEK

appx. total cost: 42 500 SEK

Visitors, booth activities

• The 180 dino eggs did not last till the end of the show. This gadget turned out to be very popular and made a nice opportunity to engage in a short conversation with gadget hunters :). Many people liked the fact that we were a proud grid dinosaur at SC13 :).
• The cards was also popular, there were people who took additional cards with together with the dino egg. Out of the 400 printed cards only 100 left (180 went with the eggs and another 120 was picked up from the table)
• This year our booth was part of the "Scavenger hunt" SC13 game for students. This was a game where students were given a "passport" with 26 clues and had to find the corresponding booth and get a stamp at the booth. Our clue was "This research collaboration funded 5 BC (before cloud) has brought alive a light weight, non-intrusive "advanced resource connector": the only dinosaur you want in your data centre". This game attracted around 30 students to our booth. They liked the 5BC and the dino. They also told us that we were one of the most difficult booth to be found. A nice story was when one of them said she had asked around for "dino" and she was told that it must be CRAY, they are the dinosaur of HPC :)
• We had all the usual friends stopping buy from EGI/EMI era. Some of them were surprised that we are still doing this business now that EMI/EGI (soon) over.

Next year

• The usual small 10x10 booth was selected. It is a corner booth again, this time right in front of the entrance. Unfortunately there will be many entrances next year and who knows if people will use this entrance at all :). Booth number is 3702.
• This year setup was nice, unless we come up with something better it can be used next year too. A possible improvement could be to use a two-sided roll-up.
• gadget is a must, make sure you'll have at least 300 pieces :)
• some food can also be a great success. Turns out people usually ask their embassies to order/transport food.

Pictures

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Actions

Read through the exhibitor info

DEADLINES

Action	Status/Deadline	Comment	AssignedTo
Find People	Done	Balazs, Christian, both already registered	Farid
Passports, Visa etc	Done	Passports OK	Balazs, Christian
Submit Company Profile	Done	Electronic profile	Farid
Pay for the booth	Done	USD 100 paid in April 2013	Farid
Order furniture	Done	Free order deadline missed by 2 days, Freeman asked if it can still be free	Oxana
Order electricity	In progress	One 110V outlet is included in the furniture order, see above	Oxana
Order Network	Done	Use wireless only	-
Tickets	Done	-	all
Hotel	Done	-	all
Design Poster	Done	a full-wall 3.2 X 1.3 large cloth poster was printed
Print Posters	Done	it was printed in Lund on cloth material
Print Address cards	Done	a marketing card was designed and printed	Balazs
Bring Posters and address card	Done	-	Balazs
Prepare slide show	Done	Based on the one last year	?
Prepare gadgets	Done	Dino eggs	Balazs
Allocate notebooks	Done	-	all
Borrow a beamer	Done	A good beamer is needed to project on a short distance concave surface	Christian
Borrow tripod for posters	Not needed	there is one in Lund
Poster fixation on curtains	Done	Railing provided by the printshop	?
Prepare scotch- and brown tape	Done	bring	Balazs
Register booth personnel	Done	costs 100 greenbucks	Balazs, Christian
Take socket adapter, power cord distributor	Done	plenty of adapters will be there	all
Hire a car	done	we hired a car on Monday morning to buy the drawer
Box cutter, straight threshold profile, scissors	Done	will bring all these stuff	Balazs
Drawing pins, tapes	done	will bring	Balazs
Cell phone + charger	done	-	all
Approximate budget	calculating the total cost	see above	?