HAMBURG, Germany, July 2 – The ISC 2026 event concluded last Friday, drawing 4,035 attendees from 64 countries for five days of discussions on the latest advancements in supercomputing. Participants also witnessed the announcement of a transition in the community’s most-watched benchmark, as stewardship of the TOP500 project passed to Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Held from June 22 to 26, ISC 2026 featured a strong community-driven technical program, including invited and contributed sessions, as well as an international exhibition with 188 exhibitors from 26 countries.
A Milestone Handover for TOP500
It was announced that a new steering committee, consisting of existing authors Jack Dongarra, Erich Strohmaier, Horst Simon, and ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) chair Christine Harvey, along with new members Satoshi Matsuoka, Wu Feng, and Anders Jensen, will oversee the transition and the new governance. A new technical committee will manage the list’s production, starting with the 68th November list.
The project was founded in 1993 by the late Hans Werner Meuer and Erich Strohmaier at the University of Mannheim, Germany.
“After managing the TOP500 since our father’s passing in 2014, we are pleased to hand it over to ACM,” said Martin Meuer, co-managing director of ISC Group. “We retained the project for over a decade to protect our father’s legacy and that of the other founding authors. We sought an organization that prioritizes the community’s interest and will not monetize the TOP500 project, and we are confident that ACM is the right home.”
A Successful ISC
Registration data from ISC 2026 revealed a diverse international audience, with participants from 64 countries. By sector, 39.5 percent of attendees were from academic and research institutions, while 33.9 percent were from hardware, software, or services vendors. Of the attendees, 63.6 percent identified their role as Industry and 30.4 percent as Academia.
Data on attendee interests indicated clear trends in the field. AI applications driven by HPC technologies and AI factories were the two most-cited areas of interest, significantly ahead of topics such as data center infrastructure, cooling, and quantum computing integration. This highlights the evolving landscape that ISC 2027 will aim to address.
Beyond the data, attendees consistently highlighted networking and ISC’s human-scale atmosphere as distinguishing features. They praised its environment compared to larger international HPC events, noting the ease of meeting peers, partners, and collaborators face-to-face.
The next ISC will take place in Hamburg from June 7 to 11, 2027, under the program leadership of Professor Rio Yokota of the Institute of Science, Tokyo, and the RIKEN Center for Computational Science.
About ISC High Performance
Established in 1986, ISC High Performance is the world’s oldest and Europe’s most-attended event dedicated to HPC, AI, and quantum computing. The conference and exhibition bring together researchers, engineers, technology providers, system operators, policymakers, and students from around the world to exchange knowledge and discuss the future of supercomputing.
Nages Sieslack
nages.sieslack@isc-group.com
