Agenda

Monday, 20 April 2026 – Tutorial Day

Start Time	Room 1 Session Title	Presenter	Room 2 Session Title	Presenter
8:00	Tutorial Registration and Welcome
8:30			Architecture, ROCm and System Setup; Containers	Bob Robey (AMD)
9:00	What is AI, machine learning, deep learning, statistical learning, applications and principles?	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	Architecture, ROCm and System Setup; Containers	Bob Robey (AMD)
10:15	Coffee Break
10:30	Neural network basics, training and validation	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	Performance and Tooling (Intro), and HIP Programming	Bob Robey (AMD)
11:15	PyTorch fundamentals, tensors, simple models, datasets and loaders	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	Profiling (Hands-on Focus); AI Topics	Bob Robey (AMD)
12:30	Lunch
13:30	Convolutional neural networks, feature extraction, simple CNN example	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	OpenCHAMI: Introduction and tooling familiarization + Fundamentals	Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL)
14:30	Convolutional neural networks, feature extraction, simple CNN example	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	Practicum 1 + Advanced Concepts for Large-scale HPC Automation and Orchestration	Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL)
14:45	Autoencoders, encoding and decoding concepts	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	Practicum 1 + Advanced Concepts for Large-scale HPC Automation and Orchestration	Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL)
15:00	Coffee Break
15:15	Language models, autoregression, transformers, large language models	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	Practicum 2 (Continued) + Discussion and Questions	Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL)
16:15	Optional extension for questions, discussion, or hands-on exercises	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	Practicum 2 (Continued) + Discussion and Questions	Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL)
16:30	Optional extension for questions, discussion, or hands-on exercises	Carlos Cotrini (ETH Zurich)	OpenCHAMI wrap-up / discussion / Q&A	Alex Lovell-Troy (LANL)
17:30	Tutorial Day Closing

Tuesday, 21 April 2026 – Main Conference

Start Time	Session Title	Presenter
8:00	Registration and Welcome
9:00	Day 1 Opening	Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS)
9:10	Sovereign AI and Data: Advancing Supercomputing to the Next Level	Thomas Schulthess (CSCS)
9:30	Opening Keynote: Resolving Molecular Transitions with Markov State Models - and Doing it 1,000x Faster with AI	Erik Lindahl (KTH)
10:25	Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs For Global Language Environments	Imanol Schlag (ETH)
11:10	Coffee Break
11:30	Sponsor Session Breaking silos architecting Multi-Protocol Data Services for Modern HPC & AI at University of Pisa	Roberto Dognini (VAST), Maurizio Davini (University of Pisa)
11:50	OpenCHAMI for AI Systems: Reflections on the First Year	Alex Lovell-Troy (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
12:40	Sponsor Session Sustainable and Autonomous HPC: Reconfigurable Architectures for Data-Intensive Science	Giordano Mancini (E4)
13:00	Lunch
14:00	Efficient Collective Communication on Modern HPC GPU Architectures	Andreas Jocksch (CSCS)
14:30	Practical Numerical Profiling: Unlocking Low-Precision Floating-Point for Scientific Computing	Faveo Hörold (ETH Zurich/R-CCS Riken)
15:00	Campus to DataCenter Distributed AI Infrastructure	Maurizio Davini (University of Pisa)
15:30	Coffee Break
15:50	Sponsor Session The Token Economy: Performance as the Profit Driver in AI	Axel Rosenberg (Weka)
16:10	From Files to Semantics: Data Services for AI Practitioners	Jan Heichler (VAST), Maria Perez Gutierrez (VAST)
16:40	Day 1 Closing Keynote: From Infrastructure to Impact: The Evolution of Italy’s National Center for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing	Davide Salomoni (ICSC)
17:30	Close Day 1 + Day 2 Preview	Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS)

Wednesday, 22 April 2026 – Main Conference

Start Time	Session Title	Presenter
9:15	Day 2 Opening	Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS)
9:20	Podman and Sarus Suite: Cloud-native Productivity Meets Native HPC Speed	Gwangmu Lee (CSCS)
9:45	Day 2 Keynote: AXeleration as a Service (XaaS): From Batch Jobs to Elastic Services in Scientific Computing	Marcin Copik (ETH Zurich)
10:40	Africa's readiness to adopting AI, Cloud and Quantum Computing	Happy Sithole (CHPC)
11:00	Coffee Break
11:20	Sponsor Session Make HPC Frictionless: an Overview on Open OnDemand and EESSI	Erica Bianco (doitnow)
11:40	AI-Driven Process Tensor Tomography for Scalable Quantum Noise Characterization	Fazeleh Kazemian (Monash University)
12:30	ETH Zurich Campus Heilbronn – Bridging Swiss Excellence at the Heart of Germany's AI Hub	Michele De Lorenzi (ETH Zurich Campus Heilbronn)
13:00	Lunch
14:00	End-to-End Characterization of HPC-AI Workflows Using Synthetic Digital Twins	Berkin Kartal (NVIDIA)
14:40	Sponsor Session Beyond Local NVMe: Disaggregated Storage for HPC, LLM Inference and Vector Search	Jordan Ranous (Western Digital)
15:00	Coffee Break
15:20	Sponsor Session Fueling the AI Factory: The Central Role of the Metadata Catalog	Jean-Thomas Acquaviva (DDN)
15:40	The state of OCHAMI at CSCS	Manuel Sopena (CSCS)
16:10	Sponsor Session AI Full Stack Redefined: Compute, Software & Storage	Dr. Ning Wu and Dachuan Huang (Huawei)
16:30	Day 2 Closing Keynote: New Frontiers in Computational Geodynamics	Taras Gerya (ETH Zurich)
17:30	Close Day 2 + Day 3 Preview	Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS)
18:30–22:00	Evening Event

Thursday, 23 April 2026 – Main Conference

Start Time	Session Title	Presenter
9:30	Day 3 Opening	Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS)
9:35	Day 3 Keynote: How Not to Decelerate Your HPC Workloads with Quantum Computing	Roberto Rocco and Gabriella Bettonte (E4 Computer Engineering SpA)
10:20	Enhancing Infrastructure Management and Datacenter Visibility and Security at CSCS with MarmotGraph	Massimo Benini (CSCS)
10:50	Sponsor Session Omnia & OpenCHAMI: open infrastructure for large-scale AI and HPC	Marc Mendez-Bermond (Dell)
11:10	Coffee Break
11:30	Bridging Cloud and HPC for Operational Ocean Forecasting	Jacopo Nespolo (eXact lab Srl)
12:00	Full-stack HPC Mobility: Portability Across the Holistic HPC Stack	Gilles Fourestey (EPFL)
12:40	Sponsor Session BeeGFS High-Performance Storage Software, Sovereign by Design	Davide Villa (thinkparq)
13:00	Lunch
14:00	denyroot: An eBPF-based Confinement Mechanism for HPC Environment	Victor Holanda (CSCS)
14:30	Architectural Bottlenecks and Value Capture in In-Situ Scientific AI for HPC	Thomas Thurston (Ducera)
15:00	Coffee Break
15:15	Operationalizing Security in Dynamic HPC Infrastructures (Lessons from CSCS Alps)	Matteo Basso (CSCS)
15:45	Conference Endnote: Scaling LLM Inference on HPC/AI Systems	Severine Habert (NVIDIA)
16:30	Close and Thank You	Brian Sparks (HPCAIC), Hussein Harake (CSCS)