As a CUDA developer, Nvidia was nice enough to provide an exhibit pass at Supercomputing 2013 for attending a session at their booth last week. Their new K40 GPU accelerator is quite the chunk of silicon with almost 3000 GPU cores and 12GB of on-board GDDR5 memory.
With ~400 exhibitors, it took over 6 hours just to walk the floor (wearing a new pair hushpuppies, which turned out to be quite comfortable). Fortunately many vendors had supplies of refreshing beverages (and the usual swag). Vendors were from all points of the world with many universities showing off their research work and tools (many open-source). As far as the computing technologies were concerned, things seemed mostly incremental. Many vendors were showing off FPGA accelerators, and software to help manage algorithms development. There was also a lot of focus on networking/networks and being able to manage & report on them.
A couple of amusing/entertaining exhibits were the (empty) NSA booth:
Supercomputing 2013 NSA Booth
Were they watching me while I watched them??
And the Lego Turing machine (RUBens):
Supercomputing 2013 Lego Turing Machine
Open-Source had prominent positions around the floor; FreeNAS (ZFS), OpenSHMEM, OpenMP, OpenACC, even a booth for LinuxFest Northwest 2014.
This year was the silver anniversary of Supercomputing, and there were special exhibits covering the last 25+ years of computing.