HPCC Summit 2013

Last week, close to 300 people met in Delray Beach, Florida, to follow an intensive and densely packed agenda full of technology content on the HPCC Systems platform. It was our third annual HPCC Summit event and doubled its attendance from the previous year. Besides the great food, party and accommodations (yeah, I thought I should mention that too), there were many plenary and break-out sessions covering a broad range of areas including HPCC roadmap, new developments, recent enhancements, applications, integration with third party platforms and more.

Some of the presentations were plain brilliant, providing material that would take weeks to fully digest, and many of the attendees will be watching the video recordings of them for months to come (in case you were wondering, we also recorded most of the presentations). And some very funny videos entered our video competition, with the winner implementing an HHPCC (Human HPCC): worth a watch if you’re up for some light humor.

An interesting aspect of the conference was the contest on ECL Bundles, which got the competitive juices flowing and brought very good submissions from several community members both, internal to LexisNexis and external too. Being one of the judges proved quite difficult as it was hard to define a single winner and we ended up giving prices (neat iPad minis) to both, the winner and the runner up. We also ended up disqualifying a submission from a clever to-remain-unnamed contestant who decided that it was a good idea to submit work done for his/her regular job as an entry to this contest (btw, the specific piece of work is quite sophisticated and very useful, and you will see it permeate into the platform in our upcoming 4.0.2 release).

And speaking of contributions, as one of the ideas floated within the conference, there is an ongoing effort to create entries of ECL code samples for the Rosetta Code project, so if you have some time to kill and or a neat idea on how to implement one of the code examples in Rosetta Code in ECL, feel free to head over to their site and submit it to their side. These entries will surely be useful to people trying to get started in ECL and/or trying to learn new ECL coding tricks.

We’ll continue to make some of the material used during the HPCC Summit 2013 publicly available over the next few weeks, but if you are particularly interested in something, please do not hesitate to ask.