Virtually everything we do is linked from http://aggregate.org/. The above photo shows our current lab configuration at the University Of Kentucky, the current lead institution for The Aggregate. From left to right: results of a CFD code are displayed on a projection video wall driven by a cluster of Athlons; KLAT2 (Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2), the world's first Flat Neighborhood Network (FNN) machine and also the primary development system for our various 3DNow! accelerated libraries; Opus, a video wall driven by a K6-2 cluster, displays an MPEG movie; a battery-powered cluster of Athlon laptops serves as a video wall displaying another set of CFD results; and Galugtica, a rag-tag fleet of surplus machines driving another video wall, serves as a development cluster for the student Linux User's Group.
For SC2002, things started with our exhibit proposal. Our exhibit plan, http://aggregate.org/EXHIBITS/SC02/SCPLAN/ was the next step, outlining how we'd put things together. The result was....
When we arrived, we found that our shipment wasn't in our booth, but some guys were. Apparently, when the carpet was laid, they accidentally cut a bunch of optical network connections, and it was going to take all Saturday to splice them. We would not be allowed in our booth until they were done. That wasn't good and was rather ironic in that our booth didn't even have a network connection!
Fortunately, although the show management couldn't tell us if our stuff had been delivered until Monday (?), we spread out looking for it Saturday and found it a couple of hundred feet away partially covered by junk from another booth. So, by late Saturday night, we had done nothing and were not allowed in our booth, but we were ready to set-up on Sunday....
Things went well, although the rear-projection pentagon, which looked so huge in our lab, looked pretty small compared to the ASCI booth behind us. Then again, ASCI was the largest booth in the entire show....
We used the pentagon to show-off our new technologies, primarily the new FNN technology (then called "Application-Specific FNNs", but later renamed "Sparse FNNs") and the revised Cluster Design Rules software tool. There was a lot of interest in the CDR because we gave a very popular tutorial at SC2002 which made a number of references to the CDR. However, we also had a variety of application demo movies playing, including...
the 9-laptop portable video wall which we had also used the year before. People continue to love that laptop wall....
Overall, it was a lousy start, but a great conference for us.
The folks who came from Kentucky were joined in this exhibit by people from Utah and Pennsylvania. Here's the exhibit staff:
The only thing set in stone is our name.