Print 'n Fly Guide to SC15 in Austin

1Print ‘n Fly | November 2015

Print 'n Fly

Guest feature by Peter ffoulkes

SC15 HPC Transforms

How RDMA is Enabling a Storage Technology

Revolution

Paving the Road to Exascale with

Co-Design Architecture

Plus...Foodies and City Guides

SPONSORED BY


Welcome to the Print 'n Fly Guide to SC15 in Austin!

Paving the Road to Exascale with Co-Design ArchitectureA New Era of Co-DesignSeamless Heterogeneous System ArchitectureA More Intelligent InterconnectBackward and Forward CompatibilityPaving the Road to Exascale

SC15 HPC Transforms – but how, what, where, when, why and for whom?

HPC Matters: The TOP500 and the road to exascaleHPC Transforms: What can we expect in the next few years?

How RDMA is Enabling a Storage Technology Revolution

A Foodie’s Guide to Restaurants and Entertainment in Austin

City Guide: Not Just BBQ and Music

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We designed this Guide to be an in-flight magazine custom tailored for your journey to SC15—the world’s largest gathering of high performance computing professionals.

To set the stage, our feature article this year exam-ines how “HPC Transforms.” In a pivotal year for the supercomputing industry, HPC Transforms is a timely theme for SC15, especially as we watch the industry moving forward in exciting new directions.

Inside this guide you will also find technical articles on supercomputing, HPC interconnects, and the latest developments on the road to exascale.

Austin is one of the top cities in the world for food and entertainment, so we’ve also included a listing of the very best restaurants and bars to meet with your friends and colleagues.

We’d also like to thank our sponsors from Mellanox for making this guide possible. We hope you find it useful.

Enjoy Austin and welcome to SC15

“Why does high-performance computing matter? Because science matters! Discovery matters! Human beings are seekers, questers, questioners. And when we get answers, we ask bigger questions. HPC extends our reach, putting more knowledge, more discovery, and more innovation within our grasp. With HPC, the future is ours to create! HPC Matters!” – HPC Matters at TACC

Visit Mellanox at Booth #613The World’s Most Scalable

Interconnect SolutionEnd-to-End EDR 100G InfiniBand and Ethernet

Welcome to the Print 'n Fly Guide to SC15 in Austin!• • • •

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Over the past decade, high performance computing has scaled from teraflop performance to Petaflop performance, and is now heading toward the Exaflop era. Technology development has had to keep up in order to enable such performance leaps, with such notable advancements as the move from SMP architecture to clustered multiprocessing with multi-core processors, as well as added acceleration from GPUs, FPGAs and other co-processing technologies.

Historically, increased performance has been achieved with development of the individual hardware devices, drivers, middleware, and software applications, further-ing scalability and maximizing higher throughput. How-ever, this trend is becoming short-lived. Enabling the next order of magnitude performance improvements for Exascale-class computing will require technology collabo-ration in all areas. The discrete development and typical integration strategy is not feasible as a solution that will meet the requirements of Exascale, as no one company or development effort can efficiently provide all the com-ponents necessary to scale performance to such a degree; therefore, a system-level approach to Exascale computing is already underway.

A New Era of Co-DesignCo-Design is a collaborative effort among industry thought leaders, academia, and manufacturers to reach Exascale performance by taking a holistic system-level approach to fundamental performance improvements. Co-Design architecture enables all active system devices to become acceleration devices by orchestrating a more effective mapping of communication between devices in the sys-tem. This produces a well-balanced architecture across the various compute elements, networking, and data storage infrastructures that exploits system efficiency and even reduces power consumption.

Exascale computing will undoubtedly include three pri-mary concepts: heterogeneous systems, direct communi-cation through a more sophisticated intelligent network, and backward/forward compatibility. Co-Design includes these concepts in order to create an evolutionary architec-tural approach that will enable Exascale-class systems.

Seamless Heterogeneous System ArchitectureAn example of recent efforts, and a more unified approach to better enable heterogeneous systems, is the OpenUCX project. OpenUCX is a collaborative effort of industry, laboratories, and academia, working together to create an open production-grade communication framework for high-performance computing applications. OpenUCX is already well underway and addresses fundamental con-cerns of application portability across a variety of hard-ware, without the need to migrate applications and the system software stack for every type of infrastructure. The participants in this initiative include IBM, NVIDIA, Mella-nox, the University of Houston, Oak Ridge National Labo-ratory, The University of Tennessee and many others. The project is also composed of many leading thought-leaders on an advisory panel to guide the efforts toward the most effective solutions for Exascale.

UCX was initially created by merging three existing HPC frameworks:

• Oak Ridge was working on an interface called UCCS, which was their framework supporting SHMEM over their systems.

• IBM was working on PAMI, which was their interface for the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer; and

• Mellanox was working on MXM, its messaging acceler-ator for MPI or PGAS, which already used a co-design approach to parallel programming libraries.

UCX will replace all of those by supporting all of these communication frameworks on one side and all hardware interfaces on the other side. The result of this approach is an optimized communication path with low software overheads, producing near-bare-metal performance and portability of software from one interconnect to another.

Paving the Road to Exascale with Co-Design Architecture• • • •

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“When you put HPC together with some of the most creative, scientific, engineering and business minds on the planet, magical things happen.” – Steve Conway, IDC


A More Intelligent InterconnectDirect communication is another important concept in achieving Exascale computing by providing a direct peer-to-peer communication path between acceleration devices. This approach significantly decreases latency and completely removes the CPU from all network com-munications. GPUDirect® RDMA is another example of co-design collaboration between Mellanox and NVIDIA, allowing direct peer-to-peer communication between remote GPUs over the Mellanox fabric and completely bypassing the need for CPU and host memory interven-tion to move data. This capability reduces latency for internode GPU communication by upwards of 70%.

The continued development of this technology will soon evolve into the next generation of GPUDirect RDMA, known as GPUDirect ASYNC, which includes additional key aspects of peer-to-peer transactions, including more control of network operations to the accelerator and offloading of the control plane from the CPU and the data path. The result will further reduce latency, allow much lower power CPUs to be coupled with GPU accel-eration capabilities, and address power reduction across peer devices that will be typical in a heterogeneous-based system balanced with both vector and scalar components.

Backward and Forward CompatibilityAnother important concept in reaching Exascale is com-patibility. Backward compatibility must always be a consideration when advancing technologies with perfor-mance improvements, but forward compatibility will be of paramount importance toward implementing Exas-cale computing. Whereas it is not uncommon for 10-20 Petaflop machines to be completely replaced within a five-year period today, Exascale machines will not be able to be supplanted so easily. As such, co-design is inclusive of using open standards for portability and compatibil-ity, ensuring that Exascale computing can be achieved without the fear that clusters will need to be entirely over-hauled or upgraded.

A common concern when working with the traditional approach (in which technologies are integrated instead of Co-Designed) is with point-to-point processor technol-ogies such as QPI or HyperTransport. Such technolo-gies have their own defined set of physical, link, routing, transport, and protocol layers which have not remained consistent and compatible over time. This not only intro-duces backwards compatibility issues between SOC-technologies, but it also eliminates future-proofing to the next generation of integrated elements. Exascale systems must have guaranteed future-proofing to maintain such a level of investment, performance, and capabilities, and to keep millions of lines of application code from being overhauled for every generation of hardware.

Paving the Road to ExascaleMellanox has already released the lowest latency end-to-end 100Gb/s interconnect solution available, enabling even more data to be transferred in less time. EDR Infini-Band capabilities already are based on the co-design approach and include numerous offloading engines and acceleration capabilities that free the CPU cores from the communications overhead, allowing the CPU to perform more meaningful application computation. This is the fun-damental reason why Mellanox, along with industry part-ners and thought leaders, continue to drive the most pow-erful and the most efficient supercomputers in the world. Mellanox has already deployed ultra-low latency 100Gb/s InfiniBand and Ethernet technology, and is executing the next generation of smart interconnect capabilities; paving the road to Exascale.

In order to reach Exaflop levels of scalability and performance, only co-design can provide a holistic sys-tem perspective that addresses the next order of mag-nitude of performance. Continued collaboration is crucial to achieving the flexibility, efficiency, and porta-bility necessary to make the move to Exascale computing a reality.

“The biggest breakthrough that we are going to get next very quickly is really the ability to analyze huge datasets, train computer algorithms using these datasets, and then push that out to the biologists very quickly. I think we can really expedite that process using High Performance Computing. And that’s why HPC matters to me.” – Thomas J. Barr, Biomedical Imaging Manager, The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital


Seating is limited, registration required. Free with SC15 Badge.

FEATURING A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FROM EYAL WALDMAN, MELLANOX PRESIDENTAND CEO, WITH SPECIAL GUESTS:Dr. Marek T. MichalewiczChief Executive OfficerA*STAR Computational Resource Centre

Jack WellsDirector of ScienceNational Center for Computational ScienceOak Ridge National Laboratory

Thomas LippertDirector of Jülich Supercomputing Center

Nov. 18, 20156:30 – 10:00 pm

JW Marriott Austin110 E. 2nd Street, Austin, TX

Grand Ballroom 5 & 6, 4th floor

You are invited to the Annual Mellanox Event at SC15

Register now at mellanox.com/sc15/event

Special Performance!AN EVENING WITH

JASON ALEXANDER AND HIS HAIR


It seems almost no time at all since we were in New Orleans at SC14 with the theme ‘HPC Matters’. While that is a message that resonates well within the community, it is also something that frequently appears to fall on deaf ears in some government and enterprise com-puting circles. Last year I was attending SC in my role as a research director with 451 Research, one of the small band of analysts that actively cover HPC ven-dors and the user community. Perhaps my strongest recollection of last year’s conference was when a former col-league fixed me with a shrewd look and said, “HPC is boring right now!” After several days of the conference I was inclined to agree with her. It’s not that there weren’t any new products or advancements being made, but they mostly seemed like incremental or iter-ative improvements, nothing obviously disruptive or game changing.

For SC15 the theme is much more dynamic and active—HPC Transforms, which begs many ques-tions: how, what, where, when, and why does HPC transform and for whom? If this year’s conference answers those questions then perhaps the reasons why HPC matters will become a little clearer to the wider community.

HPC Matters: The TOP500 and the road to exascalePerformance

Although the High Performance Linpack (HPL) bench-mark is only one valid measure of the performance of the world’s most capable machines, The TOP500 is still a good proxy for tracking the pace of super computing technol-ogy development.

The first petascale machine, ‘Roadrunner’ debuted in June 2008, twelve years after the first terascale machine —ASCI Red in 1996. Until just a few years ago 2018 was the target for hitting the exascale capability level. As 2015 comes to its close the first exascale machine seems much more likely to debut in the first half of the next decade

and probably later in that window rather than earlier. So where are we with the TOP500, and what can we expect in the next few lists?

Observations from the June 2015 TOP500 List on performance:

• The total combined performance of all 500 systems had grown to 361 Pflop/s, compared to 309 Pflop/s last November and 274 Pflop/s a year previously, indicating a noticeable slowdown in growth com-pared to the previous long-term trend.

• Almost 20% of the systems (a total of 90) use accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 75 in November 2014.

• As of June 2015 there were 68 petascale systems on the list, up from 50 a year earlier, and more than double the number two years earlier.

So what do we conclude from this? Certainly that the road to exascale is significantly harder than we may have thought, not just from a technology perspective, but even more importantly from a geo-political and commercial perspective. The aggregate performance level of all of the TOP500 machines is less than 40% of the HPL metric for an exascale machine.

SC15 HPC Transforms – but how, what, where, when, why and for whom?Guest feature by Peter ffoulkes, OrionX

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Source: TOP500.org

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TOP500 PetaScale Systems

http://top500.org/


Hybrid architectures using math accelerators are gain-ing traction and momentum in addressing the computa-tional bottlenecks in HPL performance, which may point towards looking at hybrid architectures in other aspects of system technology going forwards.

Most importantly, if HPC actually does matter, then dou-bling the number of petascale-capable resources available to scientists, researchers, and other users in a two year period moves the needle much more significantly. From a useful outcome and transformational perspective it is much more important to support advances in science, research and analysis than to ring the bell with the world’s first exascale system on the TOP500 in 2018, 2023 or 2025.

Architecture

HPL and the TOP500 performance benchmark are only one part of the HPC equation. Building a world leading system involves overcoming system bottlenecks which shift over time. For a long while floating-point computa-tional performance was a major bottleneck, but in recent years the balance has shifted to other areas including system interconnect and memory performance which are not directly measured by the HPL benchmark.

The combination of modern multi-core 64 bit CPUs and math accelerators from Nvidia, Intel and others have addressed many of the issues related to computational performance. The focus on bottlenecks has shifted away from computational strength to data-centric and energy issues, which from a performance perspective influence HPL results but are not explicitly measured in the results. However, from an architectural perspective the TOP500 lists still provide insight into the trends in a useful manner.

Observations from the June 2015 TOP500 List on system interconnects:

• After two years of strong growth from 2008 to 2010 InfiniBand-based TOP500 systems plateaued at 40% of the TOP500 while compute performance grew aggressively with the focus on hybrid, accelerated systems.

Starting in June 1014 there were signs of an uptick in the focus on system interconnects with InfiniBand-based systems exceeding 50% of the TOP500 list for the first time in June 2015.

From a technology perspective we clearly want to see improvements in computational performance, but if the bottlenecks are shifting to system interconnect, memory and software architectures then we need to look to the developments in those areas to maintain or accelerate progress towards exascale capabilities and the trans-formational capabilities of HPC in both scientific and enterprise computing.

HPC Transforms: What can we expect in the next few years?The TOP500

Probably not much that moves the needle significantly any time soon. The next milestone is to exceed the 100 Pflop/s mark. There are systems under development in China that are expected to challenge the 100 Pflop/s bar-rier in the next twelve months, but informed sources don’t expect that to happen before 2016. From the USA, both the

Coral and Trinity initiatives are expected to significantly exceed the 100 Pflop/s limit—targeting 200 Pflop/s, but not before the 2017 time frame. None of these systems are expected to deliver more than one third of exascale capability.

The road to exascale requires a different and more challenging focus. It is a system level development involving processing, networking, storage and software that is beyond the capabilities of any individual company, and quite possibly beyond the capabilities of any single country. In this scenario it is not surprising that the pace of development is slowing and geo-political and commercial economic conditions are not helping. At the same time, this feeds the requirement for a collaborative approach including open standards, open source, and co-design which are impeded by a deterio-rating political and economic context.

Source: TOP500.org

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TOP500 InfiniBand Systems

http://top500.org/


Vendors

The entire IT industry is in a transformational state, the biggest since the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, which led to the era of the “industry standard server” and the dominance of the Intel x86 architecture. That era appears to be drawing to a close. Intel still remains a technology powerhouse, but the rules that enabled the company’s success over that 30 plus year period are changing and even Intel needs to continue to adapt and evolve. These are the times when giants fall and new contenders have a chance to emerge.

Some of the best established enterprise IT giants—HP, IBM, Cisco and others are undergoing major restructur-ing and transformation. Dell is on a path to acquire EMC and gain influence over its satellite federation companies. There is a widely held perception that there is no money to be made in the HPC market, but a quick look at the stock market over the last five years shows a different picture. Certainly the market for specialist HPC technology com-panies can be volatile, but despite that volatility, market beating growth can be achieved. Cray, perhaps the most iconic hardware company associated with HPC, stands out with exceptional performance over the last five years under Peter Ungaro’s leadership, increasing revenues from $284M in 2009 to $562M in 2014.

Technology

With the market shifting away from a compute-centric focus towards data-centric issues, the spotlight also shifts towards a holistic system design perspective, and we are seeing an increasing interest in convergence, rack scale integration and overall optimization at a system level.

At the processor level we are moving towards parallelism and system-on-a-chip designs integrating FPGAs, DSPs, graphics and other technologies. At the interconnect level, InfiniBand-based systems have broken the 50% penetra-tion level in the TOP500 list for the first time. Although in the wider enterprise market Ethernet rules supreme, the shift towards appliance architectures and cloud-based services provides a significant opportunity for InfiniBand technology to be leveraged while hiding any additional complexity behind abstraction layers, which could accel-erate adoption.

Over the next five years technologies such as silicon pho-tonics and new memory architectures promise to enable a fundamental rethinking of system level design. These are no longer technologies of curiosity in the labs, but on the cusp of mainstream deployment from established vendors including Intel, Micron, IBM, Mellanox and a host of others.

Silicon photonics promises to improve connectivity and system design with higher bandwidth, lower latency, lower cost, longer distances and reduced energy consump-tion. New memory architectures such as the Intel/Micron 3D Xpoint, memristor, phase change memory and others promise to close the gap between dynamic RAM and cur-rent persistent storage technologies, addressing persis-tence, performance, durability, and energy consumption.

Although these new architectures have a significant devel-opment road ahead, they could materially alter conven-tional system design criteria and have an even larger impact on software architectures. What will be the effects on software design if all memory is persistent? What will be the effect upon legacy software based on the assump-tion that dynamic RAM is not persistent and when that assumption no longer holds true?

Source: Yahoo! Finance


Markets

If we thought the last five years were disruptive, we may not have seen anything yet, and in many ways the HPC community will continue to lead that transformation, even if it does not always receive recognition for that leadership. The general enterprise market shift towards a data-centric focus, based upon “big-data”, the impend-ing deluge of sensor data from “The Internet of Things”, and real-time analytics using in-memory databases could be the best thing that has happened to the HPC commu-nity in decades. There is increasing awareness of the need to reduce data movement and to bring compute capabili-ties to the data. Not just for efficiency reasons but also for security, compliance and regulatory concerns.

From the market opportunity perspective, the shift towards data-centric system design and an increasing desire for real-time analysis of business information may not be considered to be “HPC” in a classic sense, but the skills and techniques required to deliver results seem to be extremely similar. The distinctions between HPC and enterprise computing are continuing to dissolve. The lan-guage used to communicate with enterprise customers may be different, the cultural motivations and approaches may be different, but the technologies and computational techniques required continue to converge, which provides a significant opportunity for HPC to transform business in a material way.

Looking to the future, new disciplines such as robotics and machine learning clearly offer significant opportunity for both business and scientific computing. Perhaps SC15 will point the way to many more.

HPC Transforms: “To the Future and Beyond!”

Does HPC matter? I think yes, probably more so than ever. However, HPC needs to be active, transformational and demonstrably so. Perhaps this is the challenge to be addressed at this year’s conference. What are the paths to the future? What will be truly transformational? What specific results can be demonstrated, how, when and to what purpose?

Does the future lie with esoteric technologies such as quantum computing or quantum annealing and startups such as D-Wave Systems that are pushing the boundar-ies of achievement? Does it lie with “blue sky” research from companies like Google that can afford such luxuries? It may, but probably not significantly so in this decade. However pioneering companies such as D-Wave Systems and others still lie at the heart of HPC evolution.

Perhaps the biggest question revolves around how the community can collaborate together. If no single company, nor even a single country, can drive the agenda forwards by itself then how is progress to be made? The principles of co-design, open source and open standards are well understood and appreciated, but are also constrained by geo-political and commercial considerations.

The HPC community has a reputation for being the bell-wether of technology development, the leading light that points to the future. Perhaps SC15 will be the conference that moves beyond a defensive footing, where HPC merely matters, to be the conference where HPC is demonstrated to transform the world, and leads the industry “To boldly go where no woman has gone before!” If so, we may be able to head home confidently believing that HPC is truly exciting once more.

“Transformation is ongoing and never-ending. In a real sense, transformation is at the heart of existence. And ultimately, the challenge and opportunity for us is to perceive and comprehend the power of transformation. Nothing does that better than High Performance Computing.” – Jackie Kern, SC15 General Chair, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“We are increasingly using modeling and simulation to teach us things where experiments are hard to do. Modeling and simulation gives opportunity for every consumer good to do its job better. It’s like the golden age of aviation for the guys who got to fly airplanes when they were being invented. We got to play with computers when they became serious learning devices.” – Tom Lange, Director of Modeling, Simulation, Corporate R&D at Procter & Gamble


In this guest feature, Michael Kagan, the Chief Technology Officer of Mellanox Technologies, looks at the explosion of data and how RDMA based protocols can speed up the storage network bottlenecks.

With the explosion of data over the past few years, data storage has become a hot topic among corporate decision makers. It is no longer sufficient to have adequate space for the massive quantities of data that must be stored; it is just as critical that stored data be accessible without any bottlenecks that impede the ability to process and analyze data in real time.

Traditionally, accessing hard disk storage took tens of mil-liseconds, and the corresponding network and protocol overheads were in the hundreds of microseconds, a negli-gible percentage of the overall access time.

At that time, networks ran on 1Gb/s bandwidth, and SCSI was the protocol used for accessing storage locally while iSCSI based on TCP was developed for remote access.

However, once storage technology improved and Solid-State Disks (SSD) became the norm, access time dropped by two orders of magnitude to the hundreds of microsec-onds. Unless network and protocol access times decreased by a similar factor, they would create a bottleneck that negated the gains made by the new media technology.

This meant that the network had to handle larger band-widths, such as 40Gb/s and now even 100Gb/s driving faster data transfers. For remote access, iSCSI is still the protocol of choice; however, TCP was no longer efficient enough, such that RDMA (RoCE) became the transport of choice for data plane operation and iSER was developed as an enhancement of iSCSI.

SSD access was emulated under the SCSI layer to maintain compatibility to the existing ecosystem of block storage access, but it inherited all the overhead associated with SCSI. Recently, NVMe was invented for more efficient access to flash media, enabling higher concurrency and eliminating SCSI overhead. NVMe over Fabrics is defined as an RDMA-based protocol requiring RDMA as a basic foundation upon which the storage protocols required for advanced storage media technologies are built. RoCE is an industry standard protocol running on Ethernet/IP and InfiniBand networks and is the most efficient RDMA implementation available.

Mellanox is the world’s leader for RDMA solutions, with the most efficient implementation on the market. Mellanox also is the pace-setter for network performance improve-ments, becoming the first to offer end-to-end 100Gb/s solutions with sub-microsecond latency in 2015.

Now, storage media technology is on the verge of yet another 100-fold performance leap, and concepts such as Intel’s 3D Xpoint technology reinforce the idea that even more efficient networking will be required. Mellanox remains at the forefront of development of the network-ing roadmap and can be relied upon to provide the most efficient solutions for storage going forward.

This article was submitted by Michael Kagan, Chief Technology Officer and a co-founder of Mellanox Technologies. Michael is responsible for steering Mellanox’s product roadmap.

How RDMA is Enabling a Storage Technology Revolution• • • •

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Visit Mellanox at Booth#613

Explore Mellanox’sWinning Solutions that

Pave the Road to Exascale

And find out how you can winan Apple Watch!


TEX-MEXGueros

1412 S. Congress • 512-447-7688 www.guerostacobar.com

This kitschy SoCo mainstay housed in an 1800’s era feed store is quintessential Austin. Have pre-dinner margaritas and chips and salsa on the patio or in the bar up front or go next door and sit un-der the twisting oak trees to listen to some live Tejano music while waiting for your table. Be sure to start with fresh guacamole and have the No.1 Dinner as it comes with everything you will desire in a proper Tex-Mex combo plate including an excellent al carbon beef taco and a house-made tamale.

La Condessa400 W 2nd Street • 512-499-0300

For a more modern take on Tex-Mex, take the short walk west across Congress Ave. to the thriving Warehouse District that is teaming with brand-new offices, towering condos and tons of first-floor boutiques and restaurants. The four-sample guacamole tast-ing from the top of the menu is as unique as it is good and comes with the requisite, wonderful house salsas. The tacos are inventive as well with several takes on the classics as well as a superb veni-son option and as a must-have Texas redfish. There are thousands of recipes for moles in the world and the version here is outstand-ing—infused with flavors of smoke, chocolate and subtle spice and served on top of a tender chicken breast, you will not soon forget this culinary experience.

BBQStubbs

801 Red River Street • 512-480-8341 www.stubbsaustin.com

This music venue/restaurant is home to Stubb’s now-famous BBQ sauce and some excellent ‘cue. Sit down in this saloon-style, ca-sual joint and have the friendly, laid back servers bring you mounds of slow-smoked brisket, home-made sausage and superb sides including corn bread, potato salad and pinto beans.

Iron Works100 Red River Street • 512- 478-4855

www.ironworksbbq.com

Right by the convention center, this long-standing Austin tradition is fantastic for a no-frills, order-at-the-line and take a seat at a pic-nic table, BBQ joint. Don’t miss the brisket, beef ribs or the combo plate if you can’t decide. The plates the come with potato salad, excellent beans and white bread (of course).

VEGETARIAN/GLUTEN-FREEKoriente

621 E. 7th Street • 512-275-0852 www.koriente.com

Here the emphasis is on healthy, vegetarian Asian food served in a well-lighted, homey dining room as well as pleasant outdoor seat-ing on the patio. The menu is focused on freshly made Asian favor-ites like rice bowls and curries and superb bubble teas. Don’t miss the stir-fries and the delicious and spicy chicken bulgogi.

GROUPS OF 6 OR MOREMoonshine

303 Red River • 512-236-9599 moonshinegrill.com

This Southern-themed downtown restaurant has room inside for big parties as well as space outside on the patio. Start with a house-made cocktail from the creative list then order a round for the group of corndog shrimp and crispy calamari. Follow this up with Southern classics of chicken and waffles, shrimp and grits and the Texas-mandatory chicken fried steak. All of the dishes come with well thought-out and prepared sides and do not leave without getting the signature skillet apple pie. Reservations for big parties recommended.

WORTH THE WALK FOR LUNCHSouth Congress Cafe

1600 S. Congress • 512-447-3905 www.southcongresscafe.com

Back up in the middle of SoCo, work up an appetite as you walk up the well-populated sidewalks to the beautifully and brightly ap-pointed dining room where you can order from an array of tasty offerings. If you are in the mood for brunch (served daily) order the Niman Ranch short rib hash or the highly recommended local favorite egg dish, migas. If a more traditional lunch is in order, you can’t go wrong with one of the several, locally sourced salads and one of the exceptional house-made soups. A 20-minute walk back to downtown should be enough to work off the melt-in-your mouth corn tortillas or the excellent bread you’ve just enjoyed.

A Foodie’s Guide to Restaurants and Entertainment in AustinThere’s a lot more to Austin than just BBQ. Here are the places not to miss!By William Wallace

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http://www.guerostacobar.com

http://www.stubbsaustin.com

http://www.ironworksbbq.com

http://www.koriente.com

http://moonshinegrill.com

http://www.southcongresscafe.com


WORTH THE UBER/CAB RIDEUchi

801 South Lamar Boulevard • 512-916-4808 uchiaustin.com

While one usually doesn’t associate Austin with neo-Japanese food, this award winning, phenomenally inventive restaurant is defi-nitely worth a mind-changing trip. Impress clients by ordering the tasting menu that the world-class chefs have expertly and artfully put together. On any given night the cooks may send out just-flow-in raw yellowtail with Marcona almonds and Asian pear or Big Eye tuna served with Fuji apples. The chefs only heighten the journey by sending out a barrage of hot dishes after this course including local Wagyu beef with Ponzu sauce, pork belly with watermelon radish and grilled Norwegian mackerel with preserved lemon. Well worth the short ride indeed. Reservations recommended.

Justine’s4710 E. 5th Street • 512-385-2900

Housed in a bungalow on Austin’s up-and-coming Eastside, this quaint, yet hip French-inspired brasserie is a quick ride from down-town and is an excellent get-away from the relative bustle of Aus-tin. Unwind on the light-strung patio on a warm Fall Austin night and order a glass of wine from the fantastically, yet inexpensively curated wine list or sit inside in the candle-lit-only dining room. The French love their salads and this hot-spot does not disappoint with perfectly dressed local greens. The appetizer part of the menu is equally as impressive with traditional offerings like escargots as well as a lovely charcuterie. No trip to a brasserie shall go without at least one person at the table ordering the classic, steak frites—done here brilliantly here as a Texas ribeye with crispy, salty fries and a choice of sauces. It should be considered a crime to leave without ordering the deliciously silky chocolate mousse, of course. Reservations not needed but recommended.

DRINKS & MICROBEERS/BREW PUBDriskill Hotel

604 Brazos Street • 512-439-1234 www.driskillhotel.com

While most of Austin-related press centers around its young, hip vibe, the city does have a historic core and the Driskill Hotel Bar is a shining example of this. Ironically situated right off of the live music-driven and mostly rowdy 6th street, this plush oasis is a perfect spot to close a deal or have a quiet conversation over a well-made Manhattan. Find a spot on a comfortable leather couch or a cow-hide bar stool and soak in the opulent surroundings of the historic, 1886 hotel.

Cedar Door201 Brazos Street • 512-473-3712

www.cedardooraustin.com

Margaritas may be rather ubiquitous in Austin but unless you’ve ever been to the Cedar Door—located right by the convention center—you more-then-likely have never had a CD signature Mexi-can Margarita. Served in a pint glass complete with a self-pouring strainer, fill up your martini glass with the top-notch margarita con-coction over briny, green olives. With a huge deck outside, there is plenty of room for larger parties post-convention hours or a quick mid-day lunch/drink break.

The Ginger Man301 Lavaca Street • 512-473-8801

thegingerman.com/austin

Located in the nearby Warehouse District, the beer menu here is impressively extensive and broadly curated. Belly-up to the long bar, take a seat in one of the super-comfortable couches or hang out on the huge back-door patio and look over the voluminous list. One of the home-made “Republic of Texas” draught beers should not be over looked, including 512’s IPA or Pecan Porter or one of Real Ale’s superb brews. The list also extends to bottles, ciders and 4 oz. flights of beers including a lovely Belgian trio.

BLUESAntones

213 W. 5th Street • 512-800-4628

In a city where music reigns supreme the king of kings is Antone’s. While most legends have difficulty living up to such lofty standings, the night club lives up to its status and beyond. Once the stomp-ing grounds of John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and the till-the-end-of-time revered Stevie Ray Vaughan, the music venue still hosts world-class blues artists as well as up and coming musicians like local Gary Clark, Jr.

JAZZElephant Room

314 Congress • 512-473-2279 www.elephantroom.com

Take the stairs down to the dimly, yet warmly lit speak easy-like bar underneath Congress Ave and find a little Austin treasure where you can hear excellent local jazz. You won’t find a trendy drink list here as the classics rule, so get a gin martini and take a seat to listen to young local talent as well as vets of the scene wail away.

CIGARSBolivar Lounge

309 East Cesar Chavez • 512-472-2277 www.bolivarlounge.com

Located directly adjacent to the convention center, the shop has a retail section open to the public and a members-only area that comes with an admittedly steep fee ($50/day) but does include complimentary cocktails. Peruse the well-stocked selection and purchase a cigar to be enjoyed while walking about Austin or sit in the wood and leather appointed, clubby lounge and watch the game and have a relaxing drink.

SPAMilk + Honey Spa

100A Guadalupe Street • 512-236-1115 milkandhoneyspa.com

Do you or a significant other need a little pampering during a long day at the big convention or afterword? A very short walk to Milk + Honey will be just the remedy for a variety of expertly done spa services. Choose from the list of massages to facials to nails or get a truly luxurious package deal that comes with a wide variety of choic-es you’ll want/need for a super relaxing day. Reservations required.

http://uchiaustin.com

http://www.driskillhotel.com

http://www.cedardooraustin.com

http://thegingerman.com/austin

http://www.elephantroom.com

http://www.bolivarlounge.com

http://milkandhoneyspa.com


Austin, once a sleepy college town known for being home to state government offices and the Texas’ biggest univer-sity, has become over the last several years a vibrant, hip, dynamic city with a robust tech sector. Now a destination spot for tourists, festivalgoers and convention attendees, Austin has opened its arms to its many visitors with tons of fun and exciting things to do. The following are 5 must dos in the city as well as additional recommendations for the excellent food and entertainment scene.

Lady Bird LakeThe center of Austin both literally and figuratively is the beautiful lake named after the former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. Stretching from one end of the city to the other and beyond, the lake serves as Austin’s outdoor social and physical activity playground. Take an energiz-ing run along the lake’s miles and miles of verdant shore-side trails or rent a kayak or paddle board for gorgeous views of downtown Austin and the city’s West Hills. If this might seem like too much activity after a long day at the conference, a leisurely walk around the lake is as inviting as it is relaxing.

The Texas CapitolThe Italian Renaissance building made of locally sourced and beautiful red granite is 14 feet taller than the nation’s capitol (in typical, everything’s bigger fashion) and sits resplendently at the base of Austin’s Congress Ave. Guided tours will take you through the stunning archi-tecture and its many quirky features as well as shed light on the fascinating tales from The Capitol’s storied past. Too pretty out to be inside? Grab a lunch from one of the many cafes or food carts in the surrounding area and sit under the trees among the capitol’s gorgeously formal landscaping.

The Bats of Congress AvenueWith the stately capitol behind you, walk up Congress Ave. to the Ann W. Richards Bridge on Lady Bird Lake at sunset to witness the spectacular show. The 1.5 million Mexican Free-Tailed Bats—the largest urban bat colony in the world—leave the bridge en masse on their hunt for a dinner of local, unsuspecting insects. While late November is the tail-end (ahem) of the season, the bats should still be around at SC’15 to wow and amaze with their swirling aerial acrobatics.

The University of TexasTake a walk or short Uber/taxi ride from downtown past the capitol building a few blocks north to the sprawling University campus. A stroll through the area will reveal the University’s wonderful architecture that ranges from the Beaux-Arts Main Building to Classical to Modern examples. The University is home to 17 significantly sized libraries—including the LBJ Library—and several world-class museums. A must-see is a super rare complete ver-sion of The Gutenberg Bible at The Harry Ransom Center. One of only seven (complete or not) in North America, the bible was published in 1454 and has infinite historical/aesthetic value. The Blanton Art Museum by the Univer-sity’s football stadium is home to a superb array of various styles and techniques. With over 18,000 pieces, the well-endowed museum is particularity strong in American/Contemporary and Latin American Art.

South Congress NeighborhoodIn the other direction from downtown up Congress Ave. beyond the bridge lies the funky, eclectic South Congress neighborhood known as SoCo. The area hearkens back to Austin’s hippie, college town vibe but is squarely in the present. A walk up one side then down the other is a good 1-2 mile jaunt that has many things to see and do. Visit one of the numerous area boutiques to find cowboy boots, locally made jewelry, vintage clothes and contemporary styles. Stop in and listen to a happy hour set at one of the several music venues. Don’t miss the Continental Club—a fantastic step-back in time at 1315 S Congress Ave. Feel like relaxing with a cup of coffee or cold Shiner Bock? Involve yourself in perhaps SoCo’s greatest activity—people watching. Look forward to scores and scores of interesting people, street-performing buskers, and vintage hot rods as you grab a snack and a delicious local beverage.

City Guide: Not Just BBQ and Music5 More things not to miss in AustinBy William Wallace

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William Wallace is a freelance travel writer and self-admitted foodie that grew up in Austin, Texas and visits there frequently. The writer currently resides in Portland, Oregon.