America’s Center buzzed this week as roughly 17,000 people descended on St. Louis for SC25, the annual international conference for high performance computing, network, storage, and analysis.
It proved to be a major draw, with every hall of the convention center, including The Dome, filled with exhibits from big tech companies and smaller firms, universities, government departments and others all showing off their products and solutions related to artificial intelligence. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang even showed up on the show floor.
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“What was once considered high performance computing techniques and technologies is just what AI does now,” says Nathaniel Mendoza, chief information security officer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas.
Mendoza is also the chair of SCinet, the conference’s in-house, volunteer-built computing network that also happens to be the fastest network in the world (until it’s broken down at the end of the conference), capable of streaming 9,000 high-resolution films on Netflix at the same time.
“I’ve never seen a conference that builds anything like this ever. Why would you do that? It seems kind of silly. But we have research going on over here,” he says. “It’s a huge effort by a lot of folks to get this all working. It takes a lot of time, resources and effort. We have approximately $70 million worth of borrowed equipment and services from vendors.”
It’s a network that took about 200 volunteers to build, Mendoza says, adding some of it will remain even after the conference ends this week. The internal fiber installed this year between the convention center halls, as well as a previous network laid to the Netrality data center at 900 Walnut, will be owned by the convention center moving forward.
It was a new effort for the conference this year to involve locals in the development and buildout of such a sophisticated network. Mendoza says it’s something they expanded from a successful version of immersive mentorship opportunities for women in early- to mid-career IT positions.
“[It is] a way to bring in local St. Louis people, to kind of see SCinet, see what it’s about, learn some skills, take some stuff away, but also maybe change their trajectory in their career, and maybe want to join do what we do,” he says. “It’s an immersive experience, and it really is like drinking from a fire hose, covering all the domains of computing: wireless, DevOps, automation, [and many others] too.”
The push for this kind of local connection is something new to the conference, says Sally Ellingson, SC25’s community engagement chair.
“We hope that it’s something that continues on to each city that we go to,” she says. “We build these cohorts and then when we come back the next time we’ll have another one, and maybe invite them back and create little communities within every city that we go.”
Ellingson explains the computing conference has its favorite cities. St. Louis played host as recently as 2021, for example.
“The conference goes to the same cities over and over again,” she explains. “So we wanted to do something specific to the city that the conference is in to offer some professional development and also build a bigger community and network within the cities that we visit.”
Mendoza admits it was challenging to get locals involved in the buildout.
“We struggled because I’m not from here, and I’ve had, I have people on my team who are from here, and they struggled as well,” he says. “It’s a large commitment—at a minimum, it’s a week. We really want you for almost two [weeks]. So how do you have a real job, maintain a life, do those things while I put you in a hotel downtown?”
He says the proximity is essential for participants to get the most out of the mentorship and exposure to building such a network, which took roughly two years to plan before its two weeks of buildout.
Still, the community outreach this year was more successful than at last year’s conference in Atlanta, Mendoza says. This year saw five local community members participate, up from none last year.
“The lessons that we’re learning about how to make community outreach [work] is hard,” he says. “The lessons we [learn] in St. Louis, we’ll be building on for next year.”
Having this scale of a conference in St. Louis helps to push forward the region’s connection to the industry, argues Sachin Koshy, who leads World Wide Technology’s AI strategy for state, local government and education markets.
“The fact that we’ve already built out the ecosystem at WWT reinforces the ‘why St. Louis?’ discussion,” he says. “We’ve already been here. We just are finally getting everybody else to notice why it’s important to be here.”
Koshy points to WWT’s North American Integration Center in Edwardsville or the Advanced Technology Center in Westport Plaza, which his company is offering tours of to conference attendees.
“Our leadership is very prone to wanting to keep everything here right, wanting to grow St. Louis the right way,” he says. “We’re trying to do as much as we can to help enable, educate, and then having folks adopt the technology. St. Louis is one of those great spots where you can it’s like a sponge to a lot of this stuff, so you can put the right group of folks together in the right environment, and a lot of cool things will happen. I’m hoping that’s what happens here [with this conference].”
