The SC12 budget crisis

[sawyl]

Over coffee this morning, we discussed the piece in HPCWire that mentioned the mind-boggling sums some US government agencies spend — or, at least, used to spend prior to the new limits on their travel budgets — on features at Supercomputing:

Given that each of [the DoE] booths probably cost between $100K to 400K, many of the labs may opt to apply their travel allocations to send attendees rather than host an exhibit.

I suppose these figures come from shipping fancy bits of equipment halfway across the country, keeping people either side of the conference to deal with setup and tear down, on top of the usual T&S costs. Still, it's an awful lot of money — almost enough to pay for half a GSA regional conference in Vegas!