ISC 2026: Hot, Informative, and a Great Place to Get Together

The ISC High Performance (ISC) 2026 in Hamburg took place last week and opened the doors of the CCH Congress Center Hamburg for international HPC vendors, retailers, providers, researchers, and other experts from the wide field of supercomputing. In total, the ISC brought together over 4,000 attendees and nearly 200 exhibitors this year.

Even though there were slightly fewer passing visitors this time—perhaps because of the heat—we still had plenty of opportunities to exchange ideas and network with partners, especially at the NHR Alliance booth.

The Sofa Talks series at the NHR booth once again provided a particularly intimate setting for discussion, featuring sessions by NHR@FAU: Jan Eitzinger’s take on the Cluster Cockpit framework, Chang Liu’s insights in AI benchmarking, and Ayesha Afzal’s discussion on recognition of women in HPC, which were all very well attended.

NHR@FAU’s Conference Program

But the lively exhibition in the show hall is just one part of the ISC; it covers a diverse program of talks and tutorials in other areas of the building, such as the BoF sessions, involving Ayesha Afzal on energy-efficient HPC. She also moderated the Women in HPC Poster Pitch, which found a well-deserved winner for the best poster prize in doctoral researcher Deifilia Kieckhefen.

As another highlight of the program, Gerhard Wellein, together with Eric Schnepf, provided insights into the current state of HPC technology in Europe as part of the HPC Around the World series.

Last but not least, the Swiss-German collaborative team “FAUSION” took part in the Student Cluster Competition challenge again this year and was once again able to navigate some tough challenges together, gaining a wealth of experience—thumbs up for your great effort!

Workshop Day on June 26

Even on the last day, which was devoted entirely to workshops, the NHR@FAU was still hard at work: Bole Ma, Jan Eitzinger, and Gerhard Wellein presented their paper on “Automatic Workload Characterization on Production HPC Systems via Roofline Telemetry” in front of the audience as part of the MODA26 workshop. The keynote of the workshop showed how operational data analytics at leadership-scale HPC facilities evolved into a complex task, tiering the staggering streams of monitoring data and tailoring it to the different challenges of running a center, while noting the importance of this largely overlooked area to operating modern supercomputers.

In addition, Ayesha Afzal was involved in the EESP Workshop as a General Chair with Aditya Ujeniya presenting his paper on “Architectural Trade-offs in the Energy-Efficient Era: A Comparative Study of power-capping NVIDIA H100 and H200.” The EESP workshop was an immensely insightful event, with different topics contributing to energy efficient methods of computing. Each talk brought new things in different directions like Posit computing, dynamic job scheduling on clusters, GPU energy efficiency, and more.

Also, Lukas Schröder provided his insights in the AI on HPC Workshop. This workshop brought together researchers to address the architectural challenges of integrating AI/ML workloads into HPC environments, focusing on advancing performance engineering, scalability, and the evolving synergy between these two domains.

In their free time, various activities awaited the participants from NHR@FAU in sunny Hamburg, so there was really something for everyone. See you next year, ISC!