ISC HPC 2026 Workshop

Friday, June 23, 2026

 

The Top500 list of June 2022 had the first supercomputer with exaFLOPS HPC performance, after many years of international community pursuit of this goal, and several more systems have followed or are expected within the next year. One is the European supercomputer JUPITER, hosted by Jülich Supercomputing Centre and half funded by EuroHPC JU, guaranteeing access primarily for projects led by institutions in Europe. Now is therefore the time for HPC application software to demonstrate its readiness for extreme-scale computer systems composed from large assemblies of a heterogeneous variety of CPU processors and GPU accelerators.

Europe has been preparing HPC applications for this challenge for the last nine years through its Centres of Excellence (CoEs). Since 2015 more than 32 CoE projects have been funded; they aim at greatly extending the scalability of a large variety of HPC codes and improving their execution efficiency and performance.

Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) CoE, where both workshop organisers are task leaders, is dedicated to providing free performance assessments to HPC application developers and in particular supports the domain-specific CoEs (as well as the wider HPC community of academic and industry). Insights gathered by POP showed that, although they serve different science fields, many of the challenges that these applications face are common and also the solutions adopted. For this reason, we have organised mini-symposia at two PASC conferences addressing the question: "Are HPC codes ready for exa-scale? An EU HPC Centre of Excellence Point of View''. Representatives from different CoEs shared their experience, via presentations and panels, and very fruitful discussions resulted.

To broaden this activity to a larger community, last year we organised the second edition of this ISC workshop providing a forum to discuss common challenges, ideas, solutions, and opportunities from the point of view of HPC applications developers preparing for exa-scale. ISC is the leading HPC conference in Europe, gathering not only the main HPC vendors and providers but also developers and standardising committees from programming models, compilers, and other system software. However, we still need one of the key players in this ecosystem, the HPC applications! We seek to cover this gap and expand the ISC conference to HPC code developers.

Organizers:

• Marta García-Gasulla
  Researcher and Team Leader, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
• Brian J. N. Wylie
  Research Scientist, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich Supercomputing Centre