Austin claims to be the Live Music Capital of the World. When you make a claim like that, you have to keep upping the ante if you hope to justify it. 

Do you suppose that's why Austin will be hosting an international conference in November at which high-performance computing programmers, engineers, and scientists will try to apply supercomputing technology to rocking out?

Just askin'.

This November marks the 20th anniversary of the big Supercomputing conference put on by the ACM and IEEE. SC08 runs from November 15-21 in Austin, Texas, and registration is now open for the SC08 Technical Program.  And as, hinted at above, SC08 will feature a special Music Initiative. HPC, the conference organizers say, will change the face of music, and the Music Initiative will explore how. There will also be tracks and sessions and panel discussions on boring old themes like energy and medical bioinformatics and whether electric companies will soon start giving away supercomputers with the purchase of an electric contract and applications for heterogeneous massively parallel systems and how to even think about Exa and Yotta scale data and why HPC technology is a weapon of mass disruption. Details at http://sc08.supercomputing.org.