Print 'n Fly Guide to SC15 in Austin

1Print ‘n Fly | November 2015
Print'nFly
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 Architecture
A New Era of Co-Design
Seamless Heterogeneous System Architecture
A More Intelligent Interconnect
Backward and Forward Compatibility
Paving the Road to Exascale
SC15 HPC Transforms – but how, what, where, when, why
and for whom?
HPC Matters: The TOP500 and the road to exascale
HPC 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
Contents
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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 Solution
End-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-Design
Co-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
Architecture
An 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 Interconnect
Direct 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 Compatibility
Another 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 Exascale
Mellanox 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 PRESIDENT
AND CEO, WITH SPECIAL GUESTS:
Dr. Marek T. Michalewicz
Chief Executive Officer
A*STAR Computational Resource Centre
Jack Wells
Director of Science
National Center for Computational Science
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Thomas Lippert
Director of Jülich Supercomputing Center
Nov. 18, 2015
6:30 – 10:00 pm
JW Marriott Austin
110 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 exascale
Performance
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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Jun-08 Dec-08 Jun-09 Dec-09 Jun-10 Dec-10 Jun-11 Dec-11 Jun-12 Dec-12 Jun-13 Dec-13 Jun-14 Dec-14 Jun-15
TOP500 PetaScale Systems

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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200
150
100
50
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Jun-08 Dec-08 Jun-09 Dec-09 Jun-10 Dec-10 Jun-11 Dec-11 Jun-12 Dec-12 Jun-13 Dec-13 Jun-14 Dec-14 Jun-15
TOP500 InfiniBand Systems

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 RD 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’s
Winning Solutions that
Pave the Road to Exascale
And ﬁnd out how you can win
an Apple Watch!

TEX-MEX
Gueros
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 Condessa
400 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.
BBQ
Stubbs
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 Works
100 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-FREE
Koriente
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 MORE
Moonshine
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 LUNCH
South 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 Austin
There’s a lot more to Austin than just BBQ. Here are the places not to miss!
By William Wallace
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WORTH THE UBER/CAB RIDE
Uchi
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’s
4710 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 PUB
Driskill 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 Door
201 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 Man
301 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.
BLUES
Antones
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.
JAZZ
Elephant 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.
CIGARS
Bolivar 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.
SPA
Milk + 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.

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 Lake
The 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 Capitol
The 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 Avenue
With 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 Texas
Take 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 Neighborhood
In 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 Music
5 More things not to miss in Austin
By William Wallace
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University of Texas
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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.

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