Registration Opens August 8 for SC2003
Conference promises to "ignite innovation" though hottest-ever program, extensive exhibits

PHOENIX, August 8, 2003--Registration opens Friday, August 8, for SC2003, the annual conference of high-performance computing and networking. This year's meeting, with the theme "Igniting Innovation," will convene Nov. 15-21 at the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center.

Online registration information can be found at http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/registration.html. To qualify for the advance registration discounts, registration and payment must be received by 5 p.m. (Eastern time) Friday, Oct. 10.

Opening the technical portion of the program will be keynote speaker Donna Cox, a full professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has held a joint appointment with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications since 1985. A renowned expert on computer visualization, Cox has authored many papers and monologues on computer graphics, information design, education and scientific visualization. She has exhibited computer images and animations in more than 100 invitational and juried exhibits in the past nine years, and here work has appeared on international television, including NOVA, CNN, and NBC Nightly News.

This year's technical program includes 28 full and half-day tutorials, 60 technical papers, eight panel discussions and a series of Masterworks sessions. Visionaries and well-known leaders will speak on the state of high-performance computing and participate in lively panel discussions.

An education program will offer hands-on sessions for teacher and faculty teams to help them incorporate computational tools into the classroom. SCinet, the conference's high-performance, production-quality network backbone, will use the most advanced technology to make the SC2003 one of the best-connected sites on the planet. Several awards will be presented, including the prestigious Gordon Bell Prizes, the High Performance Challenge Awards, and the Bandwidth Challenge awards sponsored by SCinet and Qwest Communications.

The entire exhibition area of the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center has been sold out, with almost 200 industrial and research exhibitors showcasing their latest systems, services and scientific achievements.

SC2003 also marks the return of SC Global, which will link the Phoenix convention center with numerous Access Grid nodes in 16 remote locations, seven countries, and five sovereign tribal nations, distributed across four continents. A multi-national and multi-cultural meeting place, SC Global will feature art, music, dance, and other innovative uses of advanced collaboration technologies, in several Showcase events.

SC2003 is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (ACM SIGARCH). For more information, see http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/.