SC08 is the big annual conference on high performance computing. It runs from November 15 to 21 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, so if we were really into HPC and into conferences and into Texas, we'd be there listening to Governor Rick Perry and Mike Dell. I dunno about you, but neither of those eminent gentlemen is my go-to guy on HPC. 

But there's a lot more to SC08, and some of the talks will doubtless be seeds for important developments in HPC in the future. David Patterson, the Berkeley professor and inventor of RISC, not the New York governor, is speaking on his work on the multicore problem. The multicore problem is, of course, the problem of being able "to create efficient, correct, and portable software that smoothly scales when the number of cores per chip scales biennially." Intel has amended Moore's Law to state that all they have to do is double the number of cores per chip, and getting increased performance out of the multi-headed monsters is a mere software problem.

The full SC08 program is <a href="http://sc08.supercomputing.org/">here</a>.