This last week, I had the privilege to attend the biggest annual supercomputing conference in north America, SC. I was one of about ten students studying high performance computing (and related fields) who were funded to go by a travel grant from the HPC topical group of the Association for Computing Machinery. It was a blast, and I learned a ton. I haven’t had much time to write up any science results, so I figured I’d give a few brief highlights of the conference, if I could. Vast Scale SC15 was by far the biggest conference I’ve ever attended.