A convention center's usual high-speed network doesn't cut it for the SC Conference, a week-long event in Portland, Oregon, attracting 11,000 of the world's most wired computer geeks.

by Allan Lynch | September 02, 2011 | (0)

IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY DELEGATES A DESTINATION CAN HOST IF PEOPLE CAN’T WORK. And today the ability to work means cyber access: now, always, and anywhere. Free Wi-Fi in a hotel or convention center lobby or public space doesn’t cut it with leading-edge groups who are the trendsetters. Enter Portland, Oregon, who has built a loyal relationship with organizers of the SC Conference.

According to Wilf Pinfold, director of extreme scale programs at Intel, and chair of the 2009 SC Conference (SC has a flexible meaning: Super Computing, Scientific Computing or Scalable Computing; whatever these guys are talking it’s all leading-edge, big stuff the rest of us will learn five years later), Portland is the place for them. His group, which helped design the wiring system for the Oregon Convention Center, has been here more than any other city--three times and are booking their fourth conference.

They have very specific needs for their week-long conference that attracts 11,000 of the most wired computer geeks in the world.

“We tend to push the bounds of most convention centers we go into,” Pinfold said. “We quite often have to wire outside the convention center as well as inside. When we were in Reno we had to put in a new trunk line down Main Street in order to feed the convention center.

“To run it [the conference], we have teams that come into town quite early,” he continued. “As part of the conference, we set up a very high performance network in the city and that takes a year to plan, a month to get ready, a week to operate and a day to tear down. It’s rather an extraordinary network in that it’s probably the highest concentration of networking around the world for that week of the conference. It’s a pretty substantial network.” 

Surprisingly, not every city or convention center is receptive to their help or needs. Either aging infrastructure can’t handle it or restrictive and exclusive audiovisual contracts block them. 

“If the rules are too stringent about who’s allowed to touch what, that can make it very difficult to actually put the show on,” Pinfold said. “If they’re coming to us and telling us no, no, no, that’s not how we do it, we know we’ve got a problem.” 

This usually arises because the local experts don’t grasp the scope of the conference and technology it uses.

“A lot of the places we’ve gone to, and work with well now, when we first started working with them did not understand the demands of having a trade show floor full of high performance computing equipment and the need to bring in networking,” Pinfold said. “They had their own networking people, own power people, and said, ‘Well you do it this way,’ or ‘This is how we do it,’ and you have to fit in here. The willingness of the facility to work with us is important. The kinds of things that are critical to us are that we can take some ownership of the network during the period of the conference, because there are 11,000 highly technically astute people, usually with two or three devices that need to be connected and a lot of equipment on the floor that needs to be connected. That equipment is often very delicate and requires very skilled people to assemble it, so there are a lot of ways in which we have to be able to work very closely with the facility and the people who manage the facility. Portland has been excellent in that.”

Pinfold, who lives and works in Portland, thinks the city’s strength and weakness are the same.

“It’s a really nice city to visit,” he said. “It’s a walking city, and the convention center is in the city, so you don’t feel isolated. It’s really a very nice city for a convention like ours. If you’re coming in for a day or two, you don’t mind being cooped up in a convention center and not really seeing much around you. But if you’re in for a good chunk of time, and our people usually are, usually with a weekend at both ends, it’s nice to have it in a place where you don’t feel cooped up the whole time and can actually get out into the city.”

SC delegates see the city, because the event requires the use of multiple properties for accommodations and venues for specialized breakout sessions. 

“There are a lot of very good facilities for events,” Pinfold said. “We use the train station, which is right across the river, and the PCPA, which is the arts and theater facility downtown, and there are lots of other centers that you can get to. So if you can break free of just the boundaries of the building, it’s got to be one of the richest places to have an event.”

Portland’s other positive for Pinfold is scale. While 11,000 delegates isn’t small, he doesn’t want the conference to grow much larger for fear it will lose its intimate community feel. 

“We don’t want to end up limited to one or two cities,” he said. “And that has been a concern. There’s three parts to the meeting. There’s a technical conference, a trade show and then the educational conference. So what you would consider Tier One facilities tend to be very heavily focused on that trade show business just because that’s what you need the space for. If we were stuck there, I fear we would wander away from the technical conference. I think we owe delegates not to end up in a trade-show-focused facility. We want to keep it in convention centers that have a good balance between trade show floor and meeting space, and Portland is one of those.” 

Portland shines with the very high-tech world and their flexibility to work with clients. In a world where corporate road warriors and conference delegates come armed with a portable electronic office and expectations of instant and constant connections, the industry may have to redefine and rethink the criteria that define Tier One and Tier Two destinations. One+

TAGS: One+ September 2011 , technology , Portland , Oregon , business value of meetings