HPC Ignites: A Week of Illumination, Innovation, & Inspiration in St. Louis

16,500+ Attendees

524 Exhibitors

Digital Experience

On-demand recordings are available until January 31, 2026. Sign in and watch sessions commensurate with your registration category.

Reflecting on the Current Moment in Computing

The speakers and the topic areas they presented are among the primary draws for attendees. 

Keynote “Architects the future”

Futurist, author, podcaster, and professor, Thomas Koulopoulos, offered a look at what he called a “once every millennia” turning point about how we think about human value driven by AI, data, and high performance computing. Koulopoulos examined the critical forces shaping the world, including smartphones, the explosion of both devices and data, and explored the idea of AI as a collaborator, not just a tool. Cautioning us that we only have  a short window to bake values and guardrails into agentic AI, he asks the thought-provoking question, “What does it mean to be human, and what is our value when machines are smarter than all of us combined?”

If you attended SC25 but missed the Keynote, sign into the Digital Experience and watch (until January 31, 2026).

HPC Ignites Plenary

Examining the advancements happening in HPC, the plenary explored quantum computing as a new, but hard-won, accelerator for discovery that is set to augment existing systems within the next 3-5 years.

The panel featured Charles Tahan (Microsoft Quantum; University of Maryland), Antonio Corcoles (IBM Research), Kristel Michielsen (Jülich Supercomputing Center), Hongbin Liu (Microsoft Corporation), and Rick Muller (IonQ). Their discussion highlighted the current state and future trajectory of HPC with the emergence of AI, quantum, and hybrid systems. The panel closed with predictions on their views of what the world will look like three years from now at SC28.

Another Record-Breaking Year of Connectivity for SC

The all-volunteer SCinet team erected the fastest temporary network in the world, igniting collaboration and discovery at SC25.

Igniting Infrastructure Innovations

SCinet provides the high-performance networking backbone for the SC Conference, engineered to support the revolutionary computing applications and experiments on display during the week. SCinet is built from the ground up by academic, governmental, and industry volunteers who collaborate to provide this infrastructure. 

The all-volunteer SCinet team, led by Nathanial Mendoza, spends the year collaborating to erect this impressive network, builds it in approximately one month, and runs the conference week, delivering unprecedented capacity and scale.

SCinet by the numbers

Hitting a high watermark of 13.72 Tbps of peak bandwidth, SCinet makes the case for being the fastest network on the planet during the week of SC25. With 30 WAN circuits delivering blazing speeds across the spectrum, with more than 450 access points blanketing the America’s Center Convention Complex. 

The network featured $70 million in donated hardware, software, and services from 36 sponsors, and was erected by over 200 volunteers from 9 countries, 34 U.S. states, and representing 114 institutions and organizations.

Congratulations to All the Awardees

The SC Conference recognized professional achievements throughout the HPC community.

Society Awards

ACM Gordon Bell Prize

“Real-Time Bayesian Inference at Extreme Scale: A Digital Twin for Tsunami Early Warning Applied to the Cascadia Subduction Zone”

ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling

“Computing the Full Earth System at 1km Resolution”

ACM Student Research Competition (Undergraduate)

1st Place: “Accelerating Linear Solve with Mixed Precision Nested Recursive Subdivision on AI Hardware”

2nd Place: “A Formal Characterization of Non-Monotonicity in Tensor Cores”

3rd Place: “Orchid: Towards Heterogeneous Batched Eigenvalue Solvers”

ACM Student Research Competition (Graduate)

1st Place: “Unified Performance Modeling Stack for Distributed GPU Applications: Complementing Analytical Insights with Machine Learning”

2nd Place: “Scaling Singular Values Beyond GPU Memory Limits: Out-of-Core, GPU-Accelerated, and Unified Across Data Precision and Hardware”

3rd Place: “Luthier: A Dynamic Binary Instrumentation Framework Targeting AMD GPUs”

ACM SIGHPC Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

Marcin Copik, ETH Zürich

ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award

Sunita Chandrasekaran, University of Delaware

ACM SIGHPC Fellowships in Computational and Data Science

Pershia Ashar, Duke University

Sofia Alvarez-Lopez, MIT

Carlos Escalante Vera, UCSD

Fereeda Abu-Juam, University of Pittsburgh

Janiris Rodriquez-Bueno, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Hadjer Labadi, University of Chlef

ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships

Ana Veroneze Solórzano, Northeastern University

Yafan Huang, The University of Iowa

ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award

Saman Amarasinghe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

IEEE-CS Seynour Cray Comuter Engineering Award

John Shalf, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)

IEEE-CS Sidney Fernbach Award

Ewa Deelman, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (ISI)

IEEE-CS TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in High Performance Computing

Rabab Alomairy, JuliaLab, MIT

Tirthak Patel, Rice University

Yuede Ji, University of Texas at Arlington

SC Awards

Test of Time Award

“The Globus Striped GridFTP Framework and Server”; William Allcock, John Bresnahan, Rajkumar Kettimuthu, Michael Link, Catalin Dumitrescu, Ioan Raicu, Ian Foster

Best Paper Award

“ORBIT-2: Scaling Exascale Vision Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Downscaling”; Xiao Wang, Jong-Youl Choi, Takuya Kurihaya, Isaac Lyngaas, Hong-Jun Yoon, Nasik Muhammad Nafi, Aristeidis Tsaris, Fan Ming (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL); Ashwin M Aji (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., AMD); Maliha Hossain (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL); Mohamed Wahib (RIKEN Center for Computational Science, R-CCS); Dali Wang, Peter Thornton, Moetasim Ashfaq, Prasanna Balaprakash, Dan Lu (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL)

Best Student Paper Award

“X-MoE: Enabling Scalable Training for Emerging Mixture-of-Experts Architectures on HPC Platforms”; Yueming Yuan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Ahan Gupta (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Jianping Li (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Sajal Dash (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL); Feiyi Wang (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL); Minjia Zhang (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Best Reproducibility Advancement Award

“RAPTOR: Practical Numerical Profiling of Scientific Applications”; Faveo Hoerold (ETH Zürich & RIKEN Center for Computational Science); Ivan Radanov Ivanov (Institute of Science Tokyo & RIKEN Center for Computational Science); Akash Dhruv (Argonne National Laboratory); William S. Moses (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Anshu Dubey (Argonne National Laboratory); Mohamed Wahib (RIKEN Center for Computational Science); Jens Domke (RIKEN Center for Computational Science)

Best Research Poster Award

“Time-stepping Hamiltonian Simulation for Solving Nonlinear PDEs via a Quantum-Classical Hybrid Approach”; Sangwon Kim (RIKEN Center for Computational Science, R-CCS); Junya Onishi (RIKEN Center for Computational Science, R-CCS); Ayato Takii (Kobe University); Younghwa Cho (Hokkaido University); Makoto Tsubokura (RIKEN Center for Computational Science, R-CCS)

Student Cluster Competition (Overall Winner)

National Taiwan University, Taiwan

(Team) Tso-Fei Yen, Jui-Chien Tsou, Hsuan-Chi Liu, Wei-Chin Wang, Chia-Yi Chin, Kuan-Hsun Tu, (Advisor) Chun-Yi Lee

IndySCC (Overall Winner)

Zhejiang University, China

(Team) Hourong Li, Yixun Hong, JinYuan Mao, Yize Jiang, Xingxing Hao, Chenxiao Li, Chun-Yi Lee, (Advisor) Professor Zeke Wang

NOV 15–20, 2026 • Chicago, IL

As SC25 ignited the spark, showcasing the best of what this community can achieve technically, creatively, and collaboratively, the HPC journey does not end here. Just up Route 66 is the next destination for all things HPC: Chicago. For the first time, the SC Conference heads to the Windy City, a global nexus of world-class research institutions, a thriving technology ecosystem, and dynamic cultural energy.

Chicago offers the perfect backdrop for SC’s next chapter, where the community can showcase how HPC is more than technology – it is a uniting force that connects scientists, engineers, educators, innovators, and storytellers across disciplines. More than that, Chicago will be where “HPC Unites” to celebrate discovery, resilience, ingenuity, and progress.

Early SC26 Applications

SC26 is dedicating the start of their program series to the students! Currently open for submission:

Student Volunteer and Lead Student Volunteer (LSV) applications. Whether looking to contribute or to hone leadership skills, our student volunteers are some of our most valued contributors.  

SIGHPC Immersion is a launchpad for undergraduates looking to explore the world of supercomputing in-depth. Get hands-on with a mix of panels, labs, workshops and small-group mentoring.

WINS is returning for its 11th year as an immersive “hands-on” mentorship opportunity for early- to mid-career applicants in the IT field.  Participants selected will take part in the ground-up build of SCinet, one of the fastest computer networks in the world!

The SC26 core program submissions will launch in January. Check out the full list of dates and deadlines on our official website.

Exhibit at SC26 in Chicago

Exhibiting at SC offers a prime opportunity to interact with scientists and engineers, software developers, policy makers, corporate managers, CIOs, and IT administrators from universities, industry, and government agencies.

Exhibit space is already filling up for SC26 at McCormick Place! Review the Exhibitor Prospectus and discover why exhibiting is imperative if you’re looking to reach the largest audience in high performance computing.