Beyond the Build: The State and Future of HPC Software with Todd Gamblin
April 14, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific Time
Online
April 14, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific Time
Online
About the Session
The high-performance computing landscape is experiencing unprecedented hardware diversification. With the rapid integration of complex AI frameworks, custom accelerators, and cloud-native paradigms, the HPC software stack has never been more complicated—or more critical to scientific discovery.
Join the Google Cloud Advanced Computing Community for an in-depth discussion featuring Todd Gamblin, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the creator of the widely adopted Spack package manager.
In this session, Todd will unpack the current state of HPC software architecture and share his vision for where it must go next. We will explore how to tame the combinatorial explosion of software dependencies, the evolving role of package management across bare-metal and cloud environments, and the strategies required to build sustainable, reproducible software ecosystems in an era dominated by AI and heterogeneous compute. Whether you are a developer compiling complex codes, a systems administrator managing massive clusters, or a researcher relying on these tools, this session will provide essential insights for navigating the future of the software stack.
Speaker
Todd Gamblin
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Todd Gamblin is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Livermore Computing division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He created Spack, a popular open source HPC package management tool with a rapidly growing community of contributors. He leads the Packaging Technologies Project in the U.S. Exascale Computing Project, LLNL's DevRAMP project on developer productivity, and BUILD, a Strategic Initiative on software integration. His research interests include dependency management, open source, software engineering, parallel computing, performance measurement, and performance analysis.
Todd has been at LLNL since 2008. He received the Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2014, an R&D 100 award in 2019, and the LLNL Director's Science & Technology Award in 2020. He received Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009 and 2005, and his B.A. in Computer Science and Japanese from Williams College in 2002.