It’s the last day of GTC 2019, for those who know me they know it’s time for my yearly wrap up of the trade show. For the folks in charge of the show it’s feedback for next year’s GTC.
For those not familiar with my wrap up report, the last day of the show I write down all my positive and negative impressions of the show. That said here are my thoughts on this year’s GTC.
This year was a great year to attend GTC. There was the Mellanox acquisition announced the week before GTC, the release of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano (for $99), a slew of other new releases, and of course lots of fresh and new knowledge. Many of these things you can read about elsewhere, so I won’t regurgitate those here.
Here are some things from the show that may have gone unnoticed by some:
- The pervasive use of the NVIDIA T4 GPU for almost all types of workloads. A true multi-use GPU.
- Changes to the cost of NVIDIA vGPU licensing
- The enhancements made to NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC)
- The number of people considering the advantages of Cycle Harvesting (VDI by day compute by night)
This year there were several aspects of the show I really enjoyed. The first one was the birds of a feather (BoF) and community meetups after the sessions concluded for the day. I was able to attend the NGC community meetup and the Slurm BoF. both were outstanding with lots of information to be gained and a wealth of community resources! I think the teams that put these on were surprised by the success of the events.
I wasn’t particularly fond of the wait to get into the general session… the line for K4 seating wrapped around the building, the gates didn’t open until 30 minutes prior to the keynote and the doors didn’t open till about 15 minutes before the keynote. We were out in the sun getting a tan while we waited. There were obviously more people in the K4 group than any other group there. I would hate to see what happened had it rained the day of the keynote.
Continuing that thought Once the doors were opened for the K4 groups to pour in, there was very little lighting to see at the top level to make our way to the seats. This is especially true of people coming in from the very bright outside into a very dark environment. (The whole rods and cones visualization thing.) I would have liked to see either ushers at the top of the steps all the way along the hall way of the keynote with flash lights or some other form of light that could be controlled while people are trying to quickly find their seats.
I thought the diversity of sessions was wonderful. Every area seemed to have a wide range of options to choose from. The vGPU content wasn’t just focused on VDI there were all sorts of sessions you could chose from either based on your interest or to be exposed to something new. I also think the did a good job with session descriptions this year so you could gauge it’s technical content.
I was talking with Roger (one of the event coordinators) at the end of the show like I did last year. One thing I talked with him about was how you indicate a session is targeted to more of an executive of business leader. I proposed to him adding a prefix or suffix to the session number, for example ex12345 or 98765ex. That way it becomes very simple for non-techy types to identify sessions geared toward the business case for these solutions and not the ones that are diving deep into the guts of the solutions.
Some of you may be thinking, but GTC is a techy show, not a business show. It is, but, the smart techies know that to get funding for their programs they have to get buy in from business people. If you can bring them to the show they can see the value and come to better understand the business value. This will create a synergy that can help accelerate programs in organizations.
This leads me to one of my observations at this years GTC. The number of straight laced suits to t-shirts and pony tails appears to be almost 50/50 now. That’s right you walk the hallway’s you see a lot of folks in suits, almost as many as those with t-shirts. I even proposed a fun little experiment to Roger. Mount a camera in the main hallway use some image recognition and see how many are in suits vs t-shirts to show the change in attendance.
That gets me to the show floor. This year there were a lot of cool things. The robotics section was very cool from the Boston Robotics team to the building inspection bot. The VR experience was also off the hook. I love it when the first question after putting on the VR headset was “how are you with heights?” from there I was standing atop the highest mast of a ship. Absolutely awesome!
I don’t know that the extended hours were the best thing for the vendors, as many of them were dragging by the last day (more than normal). I also spent some time at the Dell booth (I work for Dell) and during sessions the show floor seemed really slow. So again I wonder if there is value to having the show floor open during sessions.
I do like the added space for the show floor that was gained by moving the keynote off site. That made it easier to walk down the isles.and for more exciting exhibits. I also am cool that they got rid of the Wednesday night party. It didn’t seem anyone else really missed it and created a lot more opportunities for dinner with friends and business partners or community meetups.
Another thing I didn’t care for this year is the design of the bags this year. The look of them is good, but the metal rods around the top of the bag are really annoying. It made it really difficult to fold it up and stick it in my other bag so I could drop it in my room. I get the point of the metal to keep the shape and make it easier to put things into it. I’m also not a fan of the zipper running long on the main compartment, to me that looks sort of sloppy and reminds me of tool bags I buy at a discount tool store.
I’m also sad that attendees did not get t-shirts this year. I love my t-shirts from GTC they are so cool. That means I had to go and purchase them at the NVIDIA store instead, which I did because they are so cool. It would be great to see a shirt again next year.
I thinks it’s really cool that as the number of speakers continues to grow that they are still nice enough to get speakers a gift. This year it was a nice notebook and pen set.
I am super excited about the NVIDIA Jetson Nano and it was great that the supply of them lasted through the whole show. Purchasing them was super simple, and the badge scanning to keep numbers in check was pretty slick too. I purchased 3 of them. Two at the end of the keynote, and one at the NVIDIA store.
The food this year was fair to midland, or fairly decent as far as conference food goes. I still don’t like having to go down those back steps to the South Hall. I think those steps are a liability waiting to happen, and this is my third year of saying that. I’m glad to the best of my knowledge no one has gotten hurt on those stairs.
One thing I continue to really appreciate that is unique, among the conferences I attend, is the use of drink tickets. It really encourages responsible drinking among attendees and NVIDIA should be commended for that.
Something that would be an awesome thing that is probably a pipe dream, is for people like me who extensively blog the sessions I attend, would be a row of tables up front in conference rooms so I don’t have to balance my device on my leg while listening to the session.
I thought it was great that the facility offered a prayer room and nursing room for those attending GTC. I think that really embraces the diversity of GTC attendees and removes barriers to attending the show. Kudos to both the event center and the show team for making these available and making sure they were publicized.
With that I think it’s about time I wrap up my wrap up post. I got to make a lot of new friends and renew my friendship with so many others. I can’t wait to see everyone next year at GTC20.
May your servers keep running and your data center always be chilled.
