This will be my 12th SC, every year except the virtual one (or was it two? I've genuinely lost track) since 2009.<p>It's a singular experience. Enormous. Part trade show, part conference, weird mix of deeply technical people, and IT manager types and the salescritters who prey on them, so there is a lot of intensely smart people and a lot of money floating around, not necessarily in the same places.<p>It historically was largely built around the national labs and their purchasing and use of very large systems, and that's still a major feature.<p>It feels like the population ratio has shifted from "people who work on computers" to "people who run work on computers" - a lower proportion of computer engineers, programmers, and top tier IT people, and a lot more folks running other people's code on other people's large systems, often with other people's data, which is a little strange.<p>There are still always a lot of interesting conversations with the people who are actually doing things to be had.