HPC’s Big Questions Take the Stage: SC26 Welcomes 20 Panels to Chicago

Panels bring the SC community together to discuss the challenges and solutions that will shape the future of high-performance computing. This year’s Panels program incorporates perspectives across a range of topics, including HPC, quantum, and artificial intelligence. In addition, interactive sessions will host varied perspectives, creating space for thoughtful debate, candid exchange, and audience participation that aims to spark innovation. Each 90-minute panel will include lively discussions that explore competing ideas, share practical experience, and examine the tough choices facing the HPC community today. 

The full week will start with a special emphasis on the importance of HPC in medical research. Featured panels include an overview of biomedical research projects in the Chicago area, discussions about how HPC has accelerated cancer research over the past decade, and HPC’s promise for the future of healthcare. Panels throughout the week span storage, memory, energy, and workforce challenges, as well as the quantum and agentic AI systems reshaping how scientific discoveries are being made. On Friday, panels will ask provocative questions that promise even more engaging scientific debate. 

Join us at SC26 in Chicago for Panels featuring thoughtful perspectives from the broad HPC community (presented in conference schedule order).

Panels will be hosted beginning on Tuesday, November 17 through Friday, November 20.

Accepted SC26 Panels

1. AI Supercomputers – Evolution or Revolution?
2. Digital Twins of the Human Heart: From Exascale Simulation to Clinical Impact
3. Building and Managing Exascale HPC/AI Supercomputing Infrastructure
4. Back to the Future for HPC and Cancer: The Transformative Next Decade in Cancer Research and Cancer Care
5. Building Gigawatt-Scale Infrastructure for AI
6. Emerging Storage Technology
7. Medical Digital Twins: Can HPC Unite the Future for Health Globally?
8. The 50-State AI Plan: A Grassroots Approach to Building a US AI Continent
9. Unleashing Performance: How CXL and Disaggregated Memory are Revolutionizing HPC & AI
10. The Future of the HPC Workforce: Skills, Scale, and Sustainability
11. Total Energy to Solution: The Computational and Economic Breakeven of Hybrid HPC/ML
12. My Coauthors Don’t Sleep: Agentic AI and Trust in Computational Science
13. HPC-Quantum Integration: Software, Systems, and Hybrid Workflows
14. From Access to Impact: Designing HPC–Quantum-AI Workflows for Scientific Productivity
15. Orchestrating the Future: Heterogeneous Disaggregation at Scale for Agentic AI Workloads
16. Beyond the Add-On: Absorbing Quantum into the HPC Ecosystem
17. Can Regional Collaborations Save HPC?
18. Brain Dump: HPC Experts Volunteer to Be Replaced by AI
19. Accelerated Quantum Supercomputing: AI, HPC, and the Quantum Applications Worth Betting On
20. Vertical Market Failure and the Future of Cold Storage for HPC and AI

View panels in the Schedule, including session descriptions and panelist bios: