GRC at SC26: a visitor's guide
SC26, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, runs November 15 to 20 at McCormick Place in Chicago, less than two miles from the Illinois Tech campus. GRC brings six workshop talks, four research posters and one paper, plus a live SPOTTER-AI demo at the DOE booth and an HDF5 birds-of-a-feather session with a CLIO demo. This guide lists every session by day, with times in Chicago time (CST).
Monday, November 16: workshops
Two talks come from work with Hariharan Devarajan, a GRC alumnus now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, at the ProTools workshop in room W176c:
- 10:30 to 10:54 a.m. Orion, an observability framework for I/O monitoring in hybrid, workflow-centric HPC systems, with Izzet Yildirim.
- 10:54 to 11:18 a.m. DataCrumbs, which captures data across the layers of an HPC storage stack to explain I/O performance, with Neeraj Rajesh.
Four more are at the PDSW workshop in room W179b:
- 10:50 to 11:10 a.m. GPUH5, by Joshua Fernandes, lets a GPU kernel write HDF5-style data without leaving the kernel. On a Gray-Scott simulation writing 380 snapshots, it hides 96% of the I/O and finishes 1.9 times faster than default HDF5.
- 11:30 to 11:50 a.m. GDSight, by Yildirim, traces each NVMe command issued through GPUDirect Storage back to the application operation that caused it.
- 12:15 to 12:20 p.m. A work-in-progress talk on trigger-gated multimodal LLM agents that monitor simulations in situ, by Hua Xu.
- 4:45 to 4:50 p.m. A work-in-progress talk on type-safe, dynamically defined metadata, led by Josh Teves of Sandia National Laboratories with GRC and Oak Ridge coauthors.
Tuesday, November 17: posters
All four research posters are on display from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Skyline Ballroom North Pre-Function area:
- ToolFuse (Yildirim) merges identical tool calls that many LLM agents issue at once. In its test, 16 equivalent requests became one execution and used 11.79 times less CPU time.
- StageOnce (Yildirim) stages each input once for a whole fleet of agent jobs on a node, cutting fleet run time by 31% to 51% at 12 concurrent jobs.
- Extending I/O observability to explainability (Rajesh) goes from measuring I/O to explaining it, so optimizations can target the cause.
- GNNs beyond HBM (Rajni Pawar) streams compressed, bit-exact features so graph neural networks can train on more data than GPU memory holds.
Wednesday, November 18: a demo and a paper
12:00 to 1:00 p.m., DOE booth 4829, station 2. Bogdan Nicolae and Jaime Cernuda demonstrate SPOTTER-AI, which detects tampered data in scientific AI workflows and traces it back to its source. The demo repeats through the hour. SPOTTER-AI is one of GRC's two Genesis Mission projects.
4:30 to 5:00 p.m., room W181abc. Trigger, Render, Reason, by Xu, is GRC's paper in the technical program. Simulations can run to completion while computing the wrong answer, a waste the paper calls dark waste. Its system, Vigil, adds lightweight science-aware checks to a running simulation; when one fires, the flagged data is rendered as images and a multimodal model judges whether the science is still valid, so the run can be stopped or restarted from a checkpoint. Across four simulation codes, Vigil caught every deliberately configured failure with no false alarms. It builds on the in situ operators Xu presented at eScience 2026.
The paper appears in "Papers in Conversation: Scientific AI at Extreme Scale", a session that closes with a panel of its authors and is livestreamed, so it can be followed from outside Chicago.
Thursday, November 19: HDF5 birds of a feather
12:15 to 1:15 p.m., room W185d. Anthony Kougkas joins speakers from The HDF Group, LifeBoat, Ohio State University and NVIDIA for "Trustworthy Data at Scale: HDF5 in the Age of AI-Driven Science". The session includes a demo of CLIO, IOWarp's agent stack, which grew into a family of releases this year.
Meet the team
Kougkas also serves on the SC26 State of the Practice committee. Xian-He Sun is a coauthor on most of the work above. The GRC at SC26 page has the full schedule with calendar files, links to each session in the SC26 program, and whom to contact about collaboration, CLIO and the SPOTTER-AI demo.