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Registration is now open for tutorials at SC2003, in which leading experts will present full-day or half-day instructional sessions on topics ranging from new programming tools to quantum information processing. The tutorials, which require a separate registration fee, will be held on Sunday and Monday, November 16 and 17.

"The tutorials at the SC conferences are one of the highlights of the technical program and a key reason for many people to attend the conference," said Harvey Wasserman of Los Alamos National Laboratory, chair of the SC2003 Tutorials Committee. "The SC2003 tutorials program will span a wide range of hot topics aimed at helping users get their work done and offering a glimpse of new and exciting technologies."

Tutorials are not included in the basic Technical Program registration for SC2003. To attend tutorials, you must purchase a one-day or two-day Tutorial Passport, which gives you the flexibility to attend multiple tutorials on the day(s) of the Passport. One set of notes and a luncheon per day are included in the Passport. You can purchase additional sets of notes on site. Some tutorial instructors also plan to provide CDs with software and other materials to their attendees.

Information about tutorial registration - either for a single session or a one-day or two-day passport - is provided at http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/registration.html.

The SC2003 tutorials program generated an unprecedented level of interest, with a record number of submissions. Internationally recognized experts from all areas of high performance computing and networking proposed more than 100 tutorials, of which 29 were accepted for this year's program.

A full list of tutorials can be found at http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/tech_tutorials.php. This year's tutorial program, one of the largest tutorial programs at any computing-related conference, will include courses on programming tools and languages such as MPI, Python, UPC, Co-Array Fortran, and OpenMP, network security, performance measurement and modeling, and high-performance storage and I/O.

Given the growing importance of distributed computing, a key focus will be tutorials covering building and administering grids, using TeraGrid, high-performance data transport, and distributed or collaborative visualization. New technologies covered will include the Lustre filesystem, regional optical networks, energy conservation techniques for servers, and, in a unique attempt to peek "over the horizon," quantum information processing.

New for SC2003 will be a selection of "hands-on" tutorials that offer attendees training using pre-prepared demos and exercises based on either local or remote supercomputing resources. Some of these tutorials will use a training lab equipped with workstations; seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

"The hands-on tutorials will be one of the most exciting parts of the conference," said Wasserman. "You'll be able to build a grid, profile an application on one of the world's largest parallel machines, run an application on the TeraGrid, or install and test a powerful cluster - all under close supervision of the leading experts in these fields." Tutorial S06, "The Grid: Software Standards for Cyberinfrastructure," by Carl Kesselman of USC/ISI, Chief Software Architect of NPACI and Co-Principal Investigator on the Globus Project, may be of particular interest to NPACI and TeraGrid attendees.

Seating is limited for each of the tutorials, so don't delay in registering for the topics that interest you.

SC2003 continues the 15-year Supercomputing Conference tradition of highlighting the most innovative developments in high-performance computing and networking. Bringing together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and managers, SC2003 in Phoenix will demonstrate how these developments are sparking new ideas and new industries, as well as rekindling older ones. The conference features the latest scientific and technical innovations from around the world, while its SC Global events will showcase achievements in the arts and sciences among dozens of remote locations.

SC2003 is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society and by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture. For more information, please see http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/.