https://www.sca-hpcasia2026.jp/
Heterogeneous architectures are increasingly central to addressing the performance, energy efficiency, and scalability challenges facing contemporary high-performance computing (HPC) systems. This Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at Supercomputing Asia / HPCAsia convenes researchers and practitioners from academia, national laboratories, and industry to discuss recent advances and open research questions across a broad spectrum of emerging computing architectures.
The BoF will cover CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, quantum computing platforms, domain-specific accelerators, as well as neuromorphic, analog, and photonic devices. Following brief introductory remarks by the session leaders, the majority of the session is dedicated to structured, community-driven discussion guided by the BoF co-leaders. Topics span the full system stack, from hardware design to programming models and software frameworks, with a focus on challenges such as interoperability, portability, and performance optimization.
The session aims to identify key research priorities, share lessons learned, and foster collaboration within the heterogeneous HPC research community.
Scope
The BoF spans the full HPC stack, from hardware architectures and system integration to software frameworks, programming models, and user-facing abstractions. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, architectural design trade-offs, system software and tooling, compilers and runtimes, scheduling and resource orchestration, and co-design approaches that align hardware innovation with application and software development. A key focus is enabling scientific applications to exploit combinations of heterogeneous resources—whether within a single node or across system partitions—without requiring developers to master each individual architecture.
The discussion will emphasize challenges related to portability, interoperability, scalability, and performance optimization in increasingly diverse systems. Participants are encouraged to consider how heterogeneous resources may be exposed to users through unified or virtualized interfaces while still preserving access to performance-critical features. The BoF will also address broader organizational and cultural implications, including impacts on procurement, application development practices, and the sustainability of the HPC software ecosystem. While commercial technologies provide important context, the primary emphasis will be on fundamental architectural, software, and scientific challenges relevant to the broader HPC research community.
Important Dates
The birds-of-a-feather session will take place during the conference in Osaka, January 2026. We will announce the exact dates once they are announced.
BoF Organizers
- Johannes Gebert (HLRS, IHR)
- Hartwig Anzt (TU Munich)
- Josef Weidendorfer (LRZ)
- Hatem Ltaief (KAUST)
- Jens Domke (Riken-CCS)
- Adrian Jackson (EPCC)
- Ivan Rodero (OpenChip)
- Omri Wolf (LightSolver)
- Matthias Lohrmann (SpiNNcloud)
- Christian Mayr (TU Dresden)
