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SC26

HPC Unites.

Chicago, IL, USA • 15–20 November 2026

SC is the world’s largest gathering of the HPC community, a week of workshops, tutorials, technical papers, panels, Birds of a Feather sessions and one of the biggest exhibitions in computing. The UK is once again out in force: 167 people at UK organisations are contributing to 91 items in the SC26 programme, from a Gordon Bell finalist and an invited talk through to dozens of workshop papers, BoFs and tutorials. Our UK guide to the week is below.

Visit the UK booths

There are four UK booths that you should definitely make time for on the exhibition floor this year.

UK Universities (booth 4656)

After a successful debut at SC25, the UK Universities booth is back (listed in the SC26 exhibitor directory under UCL), giving universities from across the UK a shared space to showcase their research computing, highlight their successes and meet international partners. It is a great first stop to find out what is happening across the UK’s research computing community and to meet the people behind it.

EPCC, University of Edinburgh (booth 3455)

EPCC hosts the UK’s national supercomputer, ARCHER2, and the Edinburgh International Data Facility, and has been a leading centre for HPC, data and AI since 1990. EPCC staff are busy across the week, including:

STFC (booth 4850)

The Science and Technology Facilities Council funds and runs large-scale UK research facilities. Its Scientific Computing Department and the Hartree Centre provide national HPC, data and AI services and help UK industry adopt advanced computing. STFC is also behind CoSeC, which supports collaborative computational research communities across UKRI. Look out for:

University of Bristol (booth 6804)

The Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) runs Isambard-AI, the UK’s flagship AI supercomputer, and Bristol has one of the busiest programmes of any UK organisation at SC26:

Other UK exhibitors include Quantum Motion (booth 5447), who also have a poster on their cloud-accessible silicon spin qubit processor.

Programme highlights

Beyond the booths, a few UK contributions not to miss:

  • Gordon Bell finalist: UKAEA’s Exascale Multiphysics Simulations for Liquid Metal Fusion Blankets is in the running for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (Tuesday 10:52am).
  • Invited talk: Peter Coveney (UCL) on Real Science on Integrated Quantum-Classical Computers (Tuesday 1:30pm). He also appears on panels on medical digital twins and on the economics of hybrid HPC/ML.
  • Technical papers: from the Universities of Leeds and Warwick on GPU inference, quantum circuit optimisation and graph neural network acceleration, alongside STFC’s paper above.
  • Tutorials: full-day tutorials on Julia for HPC (UCL) and modern HPC I/O (EPCC) on Monday.
  • Weather and climate: an invited workshop talk from the Met Office on moving from MPI+X to domain-specific abstractions for sustainable weather and climate software (Sunday).

UK activities in the SC26 programme

The tables below list every SC26 programme item with a contributor at a UK organisation, drawn from the SC26 contributors directory. Only the UK participants are named, and most items also involve colleagues from elsewhere. All times are local to Chicago (CST, UTC−6). Click a title to see the item in the SC26 programme. Sessions and rooms are subject to change, so please check the SC26 programme for the latest details.

Sunday 15 November

Time Type Activity UK participants
8:00am–6:00pm Art of HPC Biological Interfaces Mara Chiricotto, Kelly Raymond, George Williamson
8:00am–6:00pm Art of HPC Boiling the ocean… literally Sébastien Lemaire, Michele Weiland
8:00am–6:00pm Art of HPC Colourful Wind Assistance Irufan Ahmed, Sébastien Lemaire, Kaan Olgu
8:00am–6:00pm Art of HPC JASMIN in July (per day): Brownian Bouquet Sadie Bartholomew
8:00am–6:00pm Art of HPC JASMIN in July (per hour): Stochastic Sea Sadie Bartholomew
8:30am–12:00pm Tutorial Accelerated Quantum Supercomputing: A Hands-On Tutorial on Quantum-Classical Hybrid Workflows Executed on QPUs and GPUs Michael Williams de la Bastida, Zohim Chandani
8:30am–5:00pm Tutorial Core-Level Performance Engineering Filippo Spiga
8:30am–5:00pm Tutorial Introduction to MLIR Kunwar Grover
9:00am–5:30pm Workshop 2026 International Workshop on Performance, Portability, and Productivity in HPC John Pennycook
9:00am–5:30pm Workshop PMBS26: The 17th International Workshop on Performance Modeling, Benchmarking, and Simulation of High Performance Computer Systems Steven A. Wright
9:05am–9:20am Workshop Supporting a Fast-Paced National AI Resource: Portal, Identity, and Federated Access at Scale Sadaf R. Alam, Ashish Tom, Christopher Woods
9:15am–9:35am Workshop NVIDIA Vera: A Microarchitecture-Level Comparison with Grace, Turin, and Granite Rapids Thomas Green, Simon McIntosh-Smith, Joseph Moore
9:35am–9:50am Workshop Fine-Tuning Foundation Models for Micro-CT Image Segmentation Using HPC Platforms Sharif Ahmed, Tim Snow
9:45am–10:00am Workshop Quantum-HPC Workflows Across Multiple Quantum Computing Platforms: Two Case Studies John Children, Ross Duncan, Philipp Seitz
10:30am–10:45am Workshop Examining QRMI as a Unified Interface for Quantum-HPC Integration Tim Boyle, Vadim Elisseev, Mateusz Meller, Emre M. Sahin, James Thorne, Oscar Wallis, Aleksander Wennersteen
10:50am–11:10am Workshop Invited talk: “From MPI+X to Domain-Specific Abstractions: Building Sustainable Weather and Climate Software” Christopher Maynard
11:30am–11:45am Workshop Women-Led Technical Project Spotlights Michele Weiland
2:00pm–5:30pm Workshop 17th Workshop on Latest Advances in Scalable Algorithms for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Systems (ScalAH’26) Vassil Alexandrov, Philippa Rubin
2:03pm–2:22pm Workshop A Threat Model for Sensitive-Data Workloads on Multi-Tenant AI Supercomputers Sadaf R. Alam, Matt Craddock, Jim Madge, Martin O’Reilly, Babatunde Oyewo, Matt Penn, George Svarovsky, Jake Watson
2:30pm–2:45pm Workshop Agents at Your Service: Reuse-First Workflow Composition with Laminar 3.0 Rosa Filgueira
2:40pm–3:00pm Workshop Workflow-Level Scheduling of Hybrid Quantum-Classical Applications on Heterogeneous Resources Odellia Boni, Orit Davidovich, Vadim Elisseev, Vasileios Kalantzis, Evgeny Shindin
3:54pm–4:18pm Workshop The Price of a Single Source: Performance Portability of Chapel and Julia across CPUs and GPUs Andrew Morgan
4:42pm–5:06pm Workshop Mojo-Driven Performance Portability for LBM Matthew A. Smith, Zadok Storkey, Steven A. Wright
4:59pm–5:29pm Workshop Panel Discussion and Q&A: Challenges in AI-enabled Q-HPC Integration Aleksander Wennersteen

Monday 16 November

Time Type Activity UK participants
8:30am–5:00pm Tutorial Julia for High Performance Computing Mosè Giordano
8:30am–5:00pm Tutorial Modern High-Performance I/O: Leveraging Files and Objects Adrian Jackson
9:00am–12:30pm Workshop Research Software Engineers in HPC (RSE-HPC-2026) Simon Hettrick
9:00am–12:30pm Workshop Sovereign AI Supercomputing Cloud Workshop Sadaf R. Alam
9:00am–5:30pm Workshop WHPC: Building Community, Building Careers Mozghan Kabiri chimeh
9:15am–9:30am Workshop Wafer Scale Acceleration of Unstructured Finite Element Methods Emma Urquhart
9:45am–10:00am Workshop Slingshot as a First-Class Kubernetes Resource: Bare-Metal RDMA for Multi-Tenant AI Sadaf R. Alam, Thomas Green, David John, Jess Jones, Abdelwahab Kawafi, Jake Watson, Matt Williams, Christopher Woods
9:50am–10:00am Workshop Reducing Confusion and Broadcasting Understanding: An Empirical Study of the Semantics of NCCL Alastair Donaldson, Azalea Raad, Max Stupple
11:30am–12:30pm Workshop QC-HPC Ecosystem Stefano Mensa
12:00pm–12:30pm Workshop Parallel Restore-Optimized Snapshot Compression for Cost-Efficient Inference Serving Fergus Finn, Radostin Stoyanov
1:30pm–5:00pm Tutorial Workload-Manager-Agnostic QPU Integration with QRMI Aleksander Wennersteen
2:12pm–2:15pm Workshop Connecting Skills, Training and Community: Lessons from Building the HPC Workforce Eva Fernandez
2:16pm–2:23pm Workshop Code Generation with MLIR for the OPS Structured-Mesh DSL Archie Dascombe, Gihan R. Mudalige, Prakanth Thilakaraj
2:18pm–2:21pm Workshop Hardware Aware Evaluation for Statistical Estimators: A Selection Rule and Reproducible Benchmark Daria Godorozha
2:24pm–2:27pm Workshop Wafer-Scale Unstructured Scientific Computing Emma Urquhart
2:27pm–2:30pm Workshop Toward Software-Defined Performance Optimization for Emerging Quantum Systems Serena Ma
2:44pm–2:51pm Workshop Linalg vs MDH: Why Reduction Semantics Matter Tobias Grosser
4:00pm–4:30pm Workshop Keeping up the Pace: Growing AMD Flang’s OpenMP Offloading Ecosystem Akash Banerjee
4:25pm–4:50pm Workshop Security and Day-2 Resilience as First Class Control Plane Primitives for Heterogeneous Supercomputers Sadaf R. Alam
5:30pm–6:45pm HPC Unites Plenary HPC Unites Plenary Brent Gorda

Tuesday 17 November

Time Type Activity UK participants
10:00am–5:00pm Poster A cloud accessible four-qubit electron spin quantum processor in a 300 mm metal-oxide-semiconductor process Simon Benjamin, Katarina Brlec, April Carniol, Virginia N. Ciriano-Tejel, Joe Finney, M. Fernando Gonzalez-Zalba, David Ibberson, Constance Lainé, Ross C. Leon, John J.L. Morton, Keith Muir, Giovanni A. Oakes, Sebastian Orbell, Julio Figueroa Quintana, Tuula Ritakari, David F. Wise
10:00am–5:00pm Poster Breaking the chain: geometry-native state preparation with ASPIRE Fredrik Hasselgren
10:00am–5:00pm Poster Energy and Carbon Footprint of the x3d2 CFD Solver on AI-first and HPC-Class GPUs Irufan Ahmed
10:00am–5:00pm Poster Interactive Knowledge Graph Supporting Self-Directed and Personalised High-Performance Computing Education Eva Fernandez, Thomas Flynn, Mladen Ivkovic, Christopher Marcotte, Tobias Weinzierl
10:00am–5:00pm Poster Online Load Balancing of High-Order Mixed-Element Simulations on Heterogeneous Architectures Semih Akkurt
10:52am–11:15am Gordon Bell finalist Exascale Multiphysics Simulations for Liquid Metal Fusion Blankets Andrew Davis, Aleksander Dubas, Rupert Eardley-Brunt
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF Advanced Architecture Testbeds: Community Resources for HPC-AI Research Filippo Spiga
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF Julia for HPC Mosè Giordano
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF OpenCHAMI Community Birds of a Feather Sadaf R. Alam
1:30pm–3:00pm Panel Building and Managing Exascale HPC/AI Supercomputing Infrastructure Andrew Jones, Caroline Yap
1:30pm–1:52pm Paper Communication Avoiding Parallel Sketching via Sparse Subspace Embeddings Hussam Al Daas
1:30pm–3:00pm Invited Talk Quantum Programming and Applications Brent Gorda
1:30pm–2:15pm Invited Talk Real Science on Integrated Quantum-Classical Computers Peter Coveney
1:52pm–2:15pm Paper HCCL: Collective Communication for Meta Training and Inference Accelerators John Sundharam, Nicolaas Viljoen
3:30pm–4:00pm Exhibitor Forum Beyond QPU Access: Lessons from Neutral-Atom Applications and HPC Deployments Aleksander Wennersteen
3:30pm–5:00pm Panel Building Gigawatt-Scale Infrastructure for AI Nidhi Chappell
5:15pm–6:45pm BoF Confidential Supercomputing: Essential Evolution or Elegant Illusion? Sadaf R. Alam, Nigel Edwards
5:15pm–6:45pm BoF Digital Twins in HPC: From Shared Definitions to Shared Standards Andrea Townsend-Nicholson

Wednesday 18 November

Time Type Activity UK participants
10:30am–12:00pm Panel Medical Digital Twins: Can HPC Unite the Future for Health Globally? Peter Coveney
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF A Single Pane of Glass for AI Supercomputing: Interoperable Access Portals Worldwide Sadaf R. Alam, Thomas Green
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF Applications, Libraries, and Tools in Modern Fortran (alt.fortran) Christopher Maynard, Liam Pattinson
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF How Must HPC Education Change for a World Where AI Generates Our Code? Weronika Filinger
1:30pm–1:52pm Paper FluidGPU: Fine-Grained Kernel Disaggregation for Large Model Inference on Heterogeneous GPUs Zheng Wang, Chunwei Xia
3:30pm–3:52pm Paper TempGNN: An Efficient Real-Time TGNN Inference Accelerator via Target-Centric Dependency Packets Ligang He
3:30pm–5:00pm Panel The Computational and Economic Breakeven of Hybrid HPC/ML Peter Coveney
4:00pm–4:30pm Exhibitor Forum Self-Healing Slurm GPU Clusters: Fault Tolerance and Straggler Remediation for AI Workloads Karl Kloppenborg
5:15pm–6:45pm BoF Hands-On Outreach: Bridging AI, Supercomputing, and the Public Eleanor Broadway, Eva Fernandez, Spyro Nita, Darren White
5:15pm–6:45pm BoF Open Source and Sovereign Infrastructure for HPC and AI Sadaf R. Alam, Stig Telfer, Wojciech Turek
5:15pm–6:45pm BoF Scientific Software and the People Who Make It Happen: Building Our Communities and Practices Robert Haines, Marion Weinzierl, Mozghan Kabiri chimeh

Thursday 19 November

Time Type Activity UK participants
8:30am–8:52am Paper Scaling Quantum Circuit Optimization via Guided Exploration and Global Context Learning Serena Ma, Zheng Wang, Chunwei Xia
11:37am–12:00pm Paper Characterizing the Scalability and Performance of Large-Scale AI Training Under Multi-Tenancy Filippo Spiga
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF AI-Assisted Engineering in HPC Robert Haines, James Hetherington, Neil Chue Hong
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF Democratizing AI Accelerators for HPC Applications: Challenges, Success, and Support Nick Brown
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF HPC Next: Reflections and Progress on the RISC-V Ecosystem Nick Brown
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF The State of Open-Source Computer Architecture Simulators: Shared Problems and Community Action Jack Jones
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF Three Axes for Scientific AI on HPC: Energy Efficiency, Uncertainty, and Verifiable Trust Peter Coveney
12:15pm–1:15pm BoF Trusted Research Environments for AI and Integrated Science: Launching the Genesis Mission Sadaf R. Alam
2:30pm–3:00pm Exhibitor Forum From Hero Run to Fleet Proof: Reproducible AI Training Across 512 GPUs Chris Coates

Friday 20 November

Time Type Activity UK participants
8:30am–10:00am Panel Brain Dump: HPC Experts Volunteer To Be Replaced by AI Sadaf R. Alam
8:30am–12:00pm Workshop International Workshop on RISC-V for HPC (RISCVHPC) Nick Brown
8:30am–12:00pm Workshop Sustainable Supercomputing Michele Weiland
8:30am–12:00pm Workshop Thirteenth SC Workshop on Best Practices for HPC Training and Education Evguenia Alexandrova
8:35am–8:55am Workshop A case study on the resource utilisation and queue dynamics of an institutional HPC system Steven Cousens, David Laverty, David Smyth, Syed Ibtisam Tauhidi, Hans Vandierendonck
9:20am–9:40am Workshop Investigating ET-SoC-1 Vector and Parallel Performance with sGEMM Nick Brown, Richard Neale
10:40am–11:00am Workshop A community developed simulator for the Tenstorrent Tensix architecture Daniyal Arshad, Nick Brown
10:54am–11:06am Workshop Placing the Control Plane: Cloud-Native Federated Learning Across Batch-Scheduled HPC Paul J. Wright
11:50am–12:00pm Workshop Q/A and Closing Remarks Evguenia Alexandrova