I’ve been busy all day talking, listening, and maybe even learning a thing or two at the 2010 GPU Technology Conference. The speaker from the NOAA session (topic of the blog below) put the move toward GPUs into perspective toward the end of his talk today with two key points.

Everyone complains about the weather, but no one is doing anything about it. Well, the folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) aren’t doing anything about the weather either – they’re too busy trying to figure out what it’s going to do tomorrow and next week.

The 2010 GPU Technology Conference got underway on schedule today in San Jose. We got an exclusive show preview (exclusive because we were the only ones there with a camera) from Sanford Russell, the General Manager of NVIDIA’s GPU business.

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We caught up with Gordon Haff, Red Hat’s Cloud Evangelist, on the floor of VMworld last week and grabbed a short interview with him. In the discussion, we touch upon what the cloud really is, and where it makes the most sense in terms of enterprise use.

To round out our visits with the major hardware vendors, we stopped by Hewlett-Packard’s booth. We had our new pal Steven give us a walk-through on their newest big x86 iron – an eight-socket monster (64 cores total max). The system is composed of two 4-socket chassis, each of which sports up to 64 DIMM slots – meaning that filled up, you can get 2TB of RAM to go with your 64 cores of processing.

The next stop on our tour of hardware vendors was the Dell booth. We talked to a good guy named Matthew who gave us a look at their latest server. He tried his best to stay on script, while I tried my best to take him off of it. He walked us through their latest tech stuff and talked up the merits of their modular design.

While wandering the floor at the recently concluded VMworld 2010, we stopped by the IBM booth to take a look at their wares. We ran into an old pal of ours, Bob Zuber, and he walked us through their MAX 5 memory extension feature.

VMware is taking some big steps in the security and network management arena with their vShield product set. I sat in on a deepish dive into the somewhat new security products being offered by VMware to deliver on the ‘secure’ part of their “Secure Hybrid Cloud” initiative.

The speakers went through each of the three offerings, along with outlining VMware’s security philosophy, at a very brisk pace. VMware hasn’t yet provided the slide sets from the presentations, so I’m left with my cryptic and sometimes indecipherable notes. (I hate it when my fingers land at the wrong place on the keyboard. It results in sentences like this: “85 43wuo5w 8h w3n53w3w lik3 5hiw.’)

In terms of messages around VMware’s security offerings, I took away the following broad points:

One of our first meetings at VMworld was with BlueLock, who have the distinction of being one of a small handful of cloud service providers participating in VMware’s big vCloud Datacenter initiative. We spent a bit of time grilling Pat O’Day, BlueLock CTO, in their booth and learned some new things about the cloud value proposition.

Full disclosure: I’m underwhelmed by the cloud concept. To me, private clouds are the cat’s ass (meaning: good), but they aren’t a mystery – they’re just a combination of sophisticated and robust virtualization with IT best practices.

Here’s another “How HPC saves your worthless hide” type of story that comes along every once in a while. Our pals at InsideHPC publicized a collaboration between the Federal Aviation Administration and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) that should increase air safety for people riding on planes and for the people standing around underneath them.