Keynote Presentations

A View of Post-Exascale Computational Science
and the Emerging Mix of HPC, AI, and Quantum

RICK STEVENS (ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO)

PASC23 PUBLIC LECTURE
This event is free of charge and open to the general public. The lecture is given in English.

In this talk, I will outline my vision of the evolution of computational science over the next twenty years. The emergence of new platforms will complement and challenge traditional high-performance computing (HPC), impacting the types of problems we work on, the platforms that centers design and deploy, and the research that gets funded. As we launch into the post-exascale epoch, we face a computing landscape that is quite different from the one that motivated the international push for exascale HPC systems. We see the emergence of powerful AI methods from generative language models that will transform research and teaching (and exams!), to AI-HPC hybrid (or surrogate) models that promise orders of magnitude performance gains for some problems. Quantum computers and algorithms also show potential to greatly impact computational science. I will discuss how these capabilities could change the landscape of problems researchers pursue, and when and how the scientific computing community may evolve as it absorbs new approaches, sorting through what is real and works, and what is not ready for scientific application. Future platforms must be designed for the problems that the community wants to solve in the near term, while also leading us to new approaches that offer sustained impact across many disciplines.

Rick Stevens

Rick Stevens is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago as well as the Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences (CELS) Directorate and Argonne Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory. In these, and in numerous other roles, he is responsible for ongoing research in the computational and computer sciences from HPC architecture to the development of tools and methods for bioinformatics, cancer, infectious disease, and other problems in science and engineering. Stevens is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received many national honors for his research, including being named a Fellow of the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) for his continuing contributions to high-performance computing.

The PASC23 Conference Committee is delighted to host the winners of the “PRACE HPC Excellence Award” and of the “PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC” as keynote speakers within the event program.

PRACE HPC Excellence Award 2023

This award recognises an outstanding individual or team for ground-breaking research using HPC that leads to significant scientific advances. The prize will be presented at the PASC23 Conference in the form of a 30-minute plenary talk. The focus of the award is on the impact of the winning research on science and HPC, rather than on the performance aspects.

The winner will receive a prize sum of € 20’000.
The Terms of Reference of the Award, including Eligibility and Review Criteria, and information on how to submit the nominations can be found on the PRACE website.

PRIZE COMMITTEE

  • Dr Laura Grigori, INRIA (Chair of the Prize Committee, and former Chair of the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee)
  • Prof. George Biros, University of Texas at Austin
  • Prof. Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee
  • Prof. Erik Lindahl, Stockholm University
  • Prof. Nathalie Reuter, University of Bergen (Chair of the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee)
  • Prof. Matej Praprotnik, National Institute of Chemistry, Ljubljana

PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC 2023

Launched in 2016, the Award is annually presented to a female scientist who makes an outstanding contribution to and impact on HPC in Europe and the world, and serves as a role model for women who are at the start of their scientific careers.

The prize will be presented at the PASC23 Conference in the form of a 30-minute plenary talk during the closing keynote slot (shared slot with the 2023 PRACE Excellence Award).

The winner will receive a prize sum of € 1’000.
For further details about the nomination process and the eligibility and selection criteria, please refer to the Terms of Reference on the PRACE website.