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| Supercomputing Conference (SC) | |
|---|---|
| Name | Supercomputing Conference (SC) |
| Status | Active |
| Genre | Technical conference |
| Frequency | Annual |
| First | 1988 |
| Organizer | Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Computer Society, and partnering organizations |
| Venue | Variable |
| Country | United States (primarily), international rotations |
Supercomputing Conference (SC) The Supercomputing Conference (SC) is an annual international gathering focused on high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. Founded in the late 1980s, the meeting draws researchers, engineers, vendors, and policy makers from institutions such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and corporations including IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Cray Research, and Hewlett-Packard. The event serves as a focal point for collaborations among entities like National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, European Commission, NASA, and Tokyo Institute of Technology attendees.
The conference began amid technical initiatives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and formal collaborations with Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society, evolving from earlier workshops associated with Gordon Bell prize activities and benchmarking efforts such as LINPACK. Early meetings featured contributions from pioneers at Cray Research, Control Data Corporation, Seymour Cray-era teams, and academic groups from Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the program expanded alongside projects like TOP500, Message Passing Interface, OpenMP, and large-scale systems at Sandia National Laboratories, reflecting developments in processor architecture from Intel to AMD and accelerator trends exemplified by NVIDIA Tesla deployments. The conference weathered shifts due to initiatives from European Grid Infrastructure and partnerships with Compute Canada while continuing to showcase advances tied to national efforts such as Exascale Computing Project.
Organizing responsibilities rotate among major societies and laboratories; principal organizers include Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society, with sponsorship from agencies like National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, and corporate sponsors such as IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, HPE, and Amazon Web Services. Steering committees have included representatives from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and universities like Princeton University and University of Cambridge. Partner organizations often comprise ACM SIGARCH, ACM SIGPLAN, ACM SIGMETRICS, and international bodies including Japan's RIKEN, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and CERN delegations.
Venue selection has traversed major convention centers in cities such as Denver, San Diego, Portland, Oregon, Dallas, Charlotte, North Carolina, Seattle, Phoenix, and Atlanta. Notable editions include large gatherings aligned with strategic launches at locations proximate to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory affiliates. The conference has hosted special sessions and collocated workshops with entities like SCinet infrastructure builds, collaborations with TOP500 disclosure events, and joint programming with SIGCOMM and Usenix symposia. During global disruptions, virtual adaptations incorporated platforms used by Zoom Video Communications, Microsoft Teams, and services employed by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.
The technical program spans peer-reviewed papers, tutorials, panels, poster sessions, and birds-of-a-feather meetings with tracks covering topics linked to projects and institutions such as Exascale Computing Project, Human Brain Project, Blue Waters, and Fugaku development contexts. Core topics include system architecture advances from vendors like Cray Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, programming models demonstrated by MPI, OpenMP, CUDA, and OpenACC, and performance evaluation methodologies including SPEC and LINPACK benchmarks. Workshops often feature contributions from academics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin, California Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, University of Oxford, and industrial research labs such as IBM Research, Microsoft Research, Google Research, and Intel Labs.
The exhibition floor, commonly called the Supercomputing Hall, showcases hardware, software, and services from leading vendors including IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, HPE, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, AMD, Fujitsu, and cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Demonstrations have featured large-scale installations, network fabric vendors like Mellanox Technologies and Cisco Systems, storage systems by NetApp and Pure Storage, and visualization tools from Pixar-adjacent labs and institutions such as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Hall hosts vendor sessions, live system benchmarks tied to TOP500 rankings, and community-driven booths from organizations like R Consortium, Linux Foundation, and OpenStack Foundation.
The conference administers awards and recognitions including presentation of the Gordon Bell Prize, acknowledgement of influential papers through ACM and IEEE citations, and community awards by sponsors such as Intel and Cray Research foundations. Recipients often hail from institutions like University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Stanford University, University of Tokyo, ETH Zurich, and laboratories including Argonne and Oak Ridge, reflecting breakthroughs in scalability, algorithmic innovation, and application performance in domains tied to National Institutes of Health-funded research or climate modeling projects associated with Met Office collaborations.
The conference has catalyzed adoption of standards and tools such as MPI, OpenMP, CUDA, and influenced procurement strategies at national labs including Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It has provided a venue for release announcements by vendors including IBM and NVIDIA, for community benchmarking through TOP500, and for fostering multi-institution collaborations among universities like University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University and agencies such as National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. The event continues to shape research directions relevant to exascale initiatives and cross-disciplinary projects at organizations like CERN, NASA, European Space Agency, and peers in the global high-performance computing ecosystem.
Category:High-performance computing conferences