This year’s SuperComputing conference is in New Orleans. I’ve received at least 20 vendor invitations to events at SC10.

All are events held in hotel conference rooms. In New Orleans. None involve local music, local food, or anything about New Orleans. How of the locale has whizzed past? All of it.

Every one of these vendors could afford non-hotel food and local musicians. Every one. A few even could afford to rent out world-known venues like Tipitina’s or Preservation Hall. But no, these are bog-standard corporate events. That’s the mentality of SC. The mentality slops over onto the research side. While quite a few folks make honest submissions, some of the yearly award submissions are for one-off stunts. There’s no thought in those submissions towards sustainability.

Sustainability applies to everything. Music, food, even software.