Greetings from Aotearoa New Zealand!
About the history of Multicore World -
I’ve been a high tech entrepreneur for decades and one of my companies in the mid-2000s was created specifically to partner directly with Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, California, to develop and support the software platform for the Niagara servers (for the telco vertical for the APAC region). That was a sort of “beginning of the multicore era”. Apart from learning a lot about low level tech (remember OpenSPARC?) I learnt how communities and ecosystems can grow and evolve from an original platform (being HW, SW or combined). We had a good ride alongside Sun until it was bought by Oracle (which combined with the GFC made markets really tough).
In 2010 I founded Open Parallel Ltd as a strategy and technology consultancy with a strong profile in “rapid R&D” through novel projects. We started with good contracts with the likes of Intel (US) and Arm (UK) and from there I knew that I needed an “outreach strategy” aligned with the new company. We did a couple of mini conferences about “multicore and parallel computing” collocated within LCA (Linux Conference Australia) in 2010/2011 and by 2012 we were ready to start independently with Multicore World.
At the same time Open Parallel was officially selected by the New Zealand Government (through an international peer-review process) as the only company to formally contribute to the computing platform of the SKA -the Square Kilometre Array radio-telescope, the largest civil IT project in history. We had a small role in the global consortium but from the beginning were exposed to next-gen technologies (we were talking about exascale computing since 2011…).
So Multicore World became a convergence of industry, engineering and open source communities, science, academia, and government. It wasn’t envisaged as an HPC meeting but the SKA and its related computing technologies were always pushing the boundaries, and that brought us into the global HPC communities -we started to participate every year at Supercomputing from SC15 in the US and regularly from ISC17 in Germany. Multicore World became part of the international calendar (ISC in May, SC in November, MW in February).
We always explored the frontiers of tech -e.g. we discussed “edge” as the intersection of HPC and IoT in 2016, quantum technologies in 2017, etc. The transformers, interconnects and other models that power GenAI were discussed in MW years ago. And that gave MW a global reputation that explains how we can bring together so many talented leaders to New Zealand. Talent needs purpose, and Multicore World is known as a conference with premier content -no talk show, no trade show, no marketing, just core tech at serious level.
And that would answer your 2nd question: MW speakers have been keynotes at SC and ISC.
There are some core differences:
i) At SC and ISC you have 3-4 keynotes or plenary speakers at top level. In MW you have more than 20.
ii) At SC and ISC keynotes are “master classes” where the speaker presents a scripted lecture without any interaction and barely allows for 1-2 questions. At MW your keynote is dynamic, interrupted, and the Q&A goes on and on…
iii) At MW conversations are as important as presentations: MW is single track, everyone listens to everyone, and there are generous time breaks where global leaders discuss at peer-level with junior developers in a collegiate environment. As it should be.
iv) You don’t just “pass through” when you come to New Zealand -it’s a commitment and everyone stays for the 4.5 days of the conference. It’s a seriously good experience -and you learn A LOT.
v) Finally: delegate numbers in SC are 14,000+ and 3,000+ in ISC; MW is capped at 100 people so we can all actually meet and chat with each other.
Check the first MW2025 flyer at www.multicore.world with themes for 2025.
The New Zealand Government withdrew its participation at country level from the SKA project in 2019 -therefore Open Parallel is no longer involved. But we always considered the SKA as a learning experience for the future of computing platforms. Since 2016 Open Parallel has been developing concepts toward a new field that we call “Agriculture Empowered by Supercomputing”.
Therefore we have had talks in MW23 and MW24 about distributed heterogeneous computing platforms, network topologies, open source hardware (chiplets, RISC-V, FPGA, etc) and all sorts of applications about workflows, edge, storage, etc. Plus a lot of diverse topics such as data sovereignty, indigenous science, and the social implications of high tech e.g. degrowth, etc
Finally, I would like to thank Cendio ThinLinc for its ongoing sponsorship for Multicore World for many years. Both Open Parallel and Multicore World are strongly aligned within the open source ethos therefore it has been really easy to partner with the ThinLinc team worldwide. Visit www.multicore.world -all the talks from MW2024 are available online for free, just browse the programme and follow the link to their MW pages, with the slides, interviews and presentation.
See you at the 12th Multicore World in February 2025!
?