HAMBURG, Germany, December 15 – ISC High Performance is pleased to announce that Professor Jack Dongarra, a recipient of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, will deliver the closing keynote at ISC 2026. His talk, scheduled for Thursday, June 25, 2026, will address one of the most consequential transformations in the history of high performance computing (HPC).
Titled “HPC in Transition,” the keynote addresses how forces outside traditional HPC are increasingly determining the future of scientific computing. The economics of artificial intelligence (AI) and hyperscale cloud computing now strongly influence leading-edge silicon, system architectures, and software ecosystems. At the same time, energy consumption and data movement have become the primary constraints on performance, facility design, and long-term sustainability.
As AI-driven workloads increasingly define the technology frontier, long-held assumptions about computing performance are being fundamentally challenged. Rather than raw 64-bit floating-point (FP64) throughput alone, efficiency, scalability, and end-to-end workflow performance are becoming the critical success metrics.
In his keynote, Professor Dongarra will explore how these pressures are shifting HPC away from a purely FP64, node-centric paradigm toward accelerator-rich, rack-scale, and workflow-defined systems. He argues that the next era of scientific computing will be measured less by peak FLOPS and more by time–energy–fidelity trade-offs across computational pipelines.
Drawing on decades of leadership in numerical algorithms and performance analysis, Dongarra will outline how to achieve “effective zettascale” computing in practice. Rather than relying on brute-force FP64 scaling, he advocates mixed-precision methods, communication-avoiding algorithms, AI-augmented reduced-order models, and tightly integrated AI-plus-simulation workflows with rigorous error control and uncertainty quantification.
The keynote will also present an emerging reference architecture for future platforms – one that integrates simulation and AI, as well as data and workflow components, coordinating them across heterogeneous systems, cloud resources, and scientific instruments. This holistic perspective reflects the realities of modern scientific discovery and the infrastructure required to support it.
Who Should Attend?
For the ISC community, this keynote offers a strategic lens on where HPC is heading, what will define leadership in the coming decade, and how scientific impact must be rethought in an era dominated by AI, energy constraints, and complex end-to-end workflows.
The talk is particularly relevant for:
- HPC center directors and technical managers
- System architects and hardware designers
- Application scientists and computational researchers
- Software developers working across simulation, AI, and data analytics
It will also be of strong interest to policymakers, funding agencies, and industry leaders shaping long-term strategies for scientific computing infrastructure, sustainability, and digital sovereignty.
About Jack Dongarra
Professor Jack Dongarra was awarded the 2021 ACM A.M. Turing Award in recognition of his pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms, parallel computing techniques, and performance evaluation – work that has enabled application software to adapt across more than four decades of rapidly evolving HPC architectures.
Much of Dongarra’s work has become foundational to scientific and engineering software worldwide, helping developers optimize performance on increasingly powerful and diverse systems. An ISC Fellow, he has been closely associated with the conference since its inception. He is widely known within the community as a co-author of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
He holds academic appointments at the University of Manchester and the University of Tennessee, where he founded the Innovative Computing Laboratory. Dongarra is a Fellow of ISC, AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM; a Foreign Member of the Royal Society; and a member of both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
In recognition of his enduring impact on the field, ISC established the Jack Dongarra High Performance Early Career Award and Lecture Series in 2023 to support and highlight the next generation of HPC leaders.
Join ISC High Performance 2026 in #ConnectingTheDots
ISC 2026 returns to the Congress Center Hamburg from June 22 – 26 for its 41st edition. Since its inception in 1986, it has been recognized as the world’s oldest and Europe’s most attended event for the HPC community, and increasingly for AI and quantum professionals interested in performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
Contact:
Nages Sieslack
nages.sieslack@isc-group.com
