Agenda
Monday, 20 April 2026 – Tutorial Day
| Start Time | Room 1 Session Title |
Presenter | Room 2 Session Title |
Presenter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00 | Tutorial Registration and Welcome | |||
| 8:30 | Architecture, ROCm and System Setup; Containers | Bob Robey (AMD) | ||
| 9:00 | What is AI, machine learning, deep learning, statistical learning, applications and principles? | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | Architecture, ROCm and System Setup; Containers | Bob Robey (AMD) |
| 10:15 | Coffee Break | |||
| 10:30 | Neural network basics, training and validation | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | Performance and Tooling (Intro), and HIP Programming | Bob Robey (AMD) |
| 11:15 | PyTorch fundamentals, tensors, simple models, datasets and loaders | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | Profiling (Hands-on Focus); AI Topics | Bob Robey (AMD) |
| 12:30 | Lunch | |||
| 13:30 | Convolutional neural networks, feature extraction, simple CNN example | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | OpenCHAMI: Introduction and tooling familiarization + Fundamentals | Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL) |
| 14:30 | Convolutional neural networks, feature extraction, simple CNN example | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | Practicum 1 + Advanced Concepts for Large-scale HPC Automation and Orchestration | Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL) |
| 14:45 | Autoencoders, encoding and decoding concepts | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | Practicum 1 + Advanced Concepts for Large-scale HPC Automation and Orchestration | Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL) |
| 15:00 | Coffee Break | |||
| 15:15 | Language models, autoregression, transformers, large language models | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | Practicum 2 (Continued) + Discussion and Questions | Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL) |
| 16:15 | Optional extension for questions, discussion, or hands-on exercises | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | Practicum 2 (Continued) + Discussion and Questions | Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL) |
| 16:30 | Optional extension for questions, discussion, or hands-on exercises | Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich) | OpenCHAMI wrap-up / discussion / Q&A | Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL) |
| 17:30 | Tutorial Day Closing |
Tuesday, 21 April 2026 – Main Conference
| Start Time | Session Title | Presenter |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00 | Registration and Welcome | |
| 9:00 | Day 1 Opening | Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS) |
| 9:10 | Sovereign AI and Data: Advancing Supercomputing to the Next Level | Thomas Schulthess (CSCS) |
| 9:30 | Opening Keynote: Resolving Molecular Transitions with Markov State Models - and Doing it 1,000x Faster with AI | Erik Lindahl (KTH) |
| 10:25 | Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs For Global Language Environments | Imanol Schlag (ETH) |
| 11:10 | Coffee Break | |
| 11:30 | Sponsor Session Breaking silos architecting Multi-Protocol Data Services for Modern HPC & AI at University of Pisa |
Roberto Dognini (VAST), Maurizio Davini (University of Pisa) |
| 11:50 | OpenCHAMI for AI Systems: Reflections on the First Year | Alex Lovell-Troy (Los Alamos National Laboratory) |
| 12:40 | Sponsor Session Sustainable and Autonomous HPC: Reconfigurable Architectures for Data-Intensive Science |
Giordano Mancini (E4) |
| 13:00 | Lunch | |
| 14:00 | Efficient Collective Communication on Modern HPC GPU Architectures | Andreas Jocksch (CSCS) |
| 14:30 | Africa’s readiness to adopting AI, Cloud and Quantum Computing | Mervyn Christoffels (CHPC South Africa) |
| 15:00 | Campus to DataCenter Distributed AI Infrastructure | Maurizio Davini (University of Pisa) |
| 15:30 | Coffee Break | |
| 15:50 | Sponsor Session The Token Economy: Performance as the Profit Driver in AI |
Axel Rosenberg (Weka) |
| 16:10 | From Files to Semantics: Data Services for AI Practitioners | Jan Heichler (VAST), Maria Perez Gutierrez (VAST) |
| 16:40 | Day 1 Closing Keynote: From Infrastructure to Impact: The Evolution of Italy’s National Center for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing | Davide Salomoni (ICSC) |
| 17:30 | Close Day 1 + Day 2 Preview | Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS) |
Wednesday, 22 April 2026 – Main Conference
| Start Time | Session Title | Presenter |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 | Day 2 Opening | Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS) |
| 9:05 | Day 2 Keynote: AXeleration as a Service (XaaS): From Batch Jobs to Elastic Services in Scientific Computing | Marcin Copik (ETH Zurich) |
| 10:00 | Practical Numerical Profiling: Unlocking Low-Precision Floating-Point for Scientific Computing | Faveo Hörold (ETH Zurich/R-CCS Riken) |
| 10:30 | Podman and Sarus Suite: Cloud-native Productivity Meets Native HPC Speed | Gwangmu Lee (CSCS) |
| 11:00 | Coffee Break | |
| 11:20 | Sponsor Session Make HPC Frictionless: an Overview on Open OnDemand and EESSI |
Erica Bianco (doitnow) |
| 11:40 | AI-Driven Process Tensor Tomography for Scalable Quantum Noise Characterization | Fazeleh Kazemian (Monash University) |
| 12:30 | ETH Zurich Campus Heilbronn – Bridging Swiss Excellence at the Heart of Germany's AI Hub | Michele De Lorenzi (ETH Zurich Campus Heilbronn) |
| 13:00 | Lunch | |
| 14:00 | End-to-End Characterization of HPC-AI Workflows Using Synthetic Digital Twins | Berkin Kartal (NVIDIA) |
| 14:40 | Sponsor Session Beyond Local NVMe: Disaggregated Storage for HPC, LLM Inference and Vector Search |
Jordan Ranous (Western Digital) |
| 15:00 | Coffee Break | |
| 15:20 | Sponsor Session Fueling the AI Factory: The Central Role of the Metadata Catalog |
Jean-Thomas Acquaviva (DDN) |
| 15:40 | The state of OCHAMI at CSCS | Manuel Sopena (CSCS) |
| 16:10 | Sponsor Session AI Full Stack Redefined: Compute, Software & Storage |
Dachuan Huang and Frank Zhang (Huawei) |
| 16:30 | Day 2 Closing Keynote: New Frontiers in Computational Geodynamics | Taras Gerya (ETH Zurich) |
| 17:20 | Close Day 2 + Day 3 Preview | Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS) |
| 19:00–22:00 | Evening Event |
Thursday, 23 April 2026 – Main Conference
| Start Time | Session Title | Presenter |
|---|---|---|
| 9:30 | Day 3 Opening | Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS) |
| 9:35 | Day 3 Keynote: How Not to Decelerate Your HPC Workloads with Quantum Computing | Roberto Rocco and Gabriella Bettonte (E4 Computer Engineering SpA) |
| 10:20 | Enhancing Infrastructure Management and Datacenter Visibility and Security at CSCS with MarmotGraph | Massimo Benini (CSCS) |
| 10:50 | Sponsor Session Omnia & OpenCHAMI: open infrastructure for large-scale AI and HPC |
Marc Mendez-Bermond (Dell) |
| 11:10 | Coffee Break | |
| 11:30 | Bridging Cloud and HPC for Operational Ocean Forecasting | Jacopo Nespolo (eXact lab Srl) |
| 12:00 | Full-stack HPC Mobility: Portability Across the Holistic HPC Stack | Gilles Fourestey (EPFL) |
| 12:40 | Sponsor Session BeeGFS High-Performance Storage Software, Sovereign by Design |
Davide Villa (thinkparq) |
| 13:00 | Lunch | |
| 14:00 | denyroot: An eBPF-based Confinement Mechanism for HPC Environment | Victor Holanda (CSCS) |
| 14:30 | Architectural Bottlenecks and Value Capture in In-Situ Scientific AI for HPC | Thomas Thurston (Ducera) |
| 15:00 | TBD | (HPE) |
| 15:20 | Coffee Break | |
| 15:40 | Operationalizing Security in Dynamic HPC Infrastructures (Lessons from CSCS Alps) | Matteo Basso (CSCS) |
| 16:10 | Conference Endnote: Scaling LLM Inference on HPC/AI Systems | Severine Habert (NVIDIA) |
| 17:00 | Close and Thank You | Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS) |