Each of the three days of the conference programme will feature a keynote speaker; with other presentations that day following on related topics.

During the Wednesday, June 23 opening session, Steve J. Wallach, vice president and chief technology officer of Chiaro Networks based in Texas, will discuss "The Search for the Softron - Will We Be able to Develop Software for Petaflop/s Computing?"

Mr. Wallach will first seek to derive some of the guiding principles for petaflop software development, then embark on the search for the elusive "Softron". "This search will ultimately lead to new principles of development as well as the appropriate models for programming petaflop/s computing systems", according to Wallach, who is also a consultant to the U.S. DOE ASCI programme. Previously he was co-founder, chief technology officer and senior vice president of development of Convex Computers and before that he was manager of Advanced Development for Data General. Wallach has 33 patents and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE.

On Thursday, June 24, Bill Camp of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and Fred Weber of AMD in California will give a keynote presentation on "The Red Storm Project-History and Anatomy of a Supercomputer". In their abstract, they note that "The beginning of the twenty first century has been one of continuing tumult in the high-performance computing industry" and there is no common theme in the market.

In their talk, they will discuss the difficulties faced by Sandia as the laboratory struggled to acquire a follow-on the "ASCI RED" supercomputer, the first terascale system ever fielded. Unable to find a commercial product that was scalable to the 100 teraflop/s level by 2005, Sandia developed its own architecture and partnered with Cray to engineer and commercialize the design, known as Red Storm. The talk will review both the hardware and architecture and cover some of the projectís history.

Camp, who is director of Computers, Computation and Mathematics at Sandia National Laboratories, was one of the designers of Red Storm and was the first leader of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) at Sandia. Weber is vice president of engineering for the Computation Products Group and chief technology officer at AMD and was involved in the development of the AMD-K6 and Athlon processors.

The Friday, June 25, keynote talk on ìIntegrating Data and Information Managementî will be given by Reagan Moore, co-programme director for Data and Knowledge Systems at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. In his talk, Moore will look at the emerging approach of using ìvirtualization mechanisms for the management, analysis, and preservation of distributed digital data that relies upon the separation of content management from context management from knowledge management.

This approach is being used to implement data Grids for the sharing of data, digital libraries for the publication of data, and persistent archives for the preservation of data and the management of technology evolution. The goal is to build a data management environment in which all aspects of data discovery, manipulation, and preservation can be automated, and driven from an application.

In addition to the three-day technical programme, ISC2004 features a one-day tutorial on Tuesday, June 22, and an extensive three-day exhibition by the world's leading vendors of HPC systems and services.

Attendees who register for ISC2004 before May 7 will benefit from the advance registration rates, saving up to 100 euros over the late registration fees. Registration information can be found at https://www.secure-registration.de/index.php?s=reg

Complete information about the conference can be found at http://www.isc2004.org/ .