Global Visionaries on the Future of Supercomputing, AI & Science: Jack Dongarra, Torsten Hoefler, & Satoshi Matsuoka
December 1, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific Time
Online
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About the Session
Fresh off the landmark announcements at SC26, the supercomputing landscape finds itself at a historic inflection point. The traditional boundaries between exascale numerical modeling, extreme-scale AI training, and specialized hardware accelerators are dissolving into a unified scientific discovery paradigm.
In this Google Cloud Advanced Computing Community (GCACC) online session, three of the world’s most influential high-performance computing pioneers—Turing Award laureate Jack Dongarra, ETH Zurich’s Torsten Hoefler, and RIKEN R-CCS Director Satoshi Matsuoka—convene for an unfiltered, forward-looking roundtable.
Together, the panelists will synthesize the critical technological news and achievements revealed at SC26, and share their candid projections for what is in store for supercomputing, frontier AI, and scientific discovery in 2027. Attendees will gain firsthand perspectives on how research laboratories, academic institutions, technology vendors, hyperscale cloud platforms, and applications developers and users must adapt their architectures, application development, workflows, and more to thrive and lead in the post-exascale, AI-native era.
Speakers
Jack Dongarra
Emeritus Professor, University of Tennessee; Turing Fellow, University of Manchester
Jack Dongarra received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Chicago State University in 1972 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980. He worked at the Argonne National Laboratory until 1989, becoming a senior scientist. He was a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee from 1989 until 2023 when he became Emeritus Research Professor and holds the title of Distinguished Research Staff in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Turing Fellow at Manchester University; an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He was the founding director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee until 2022.
He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI, NetSolve, Top500, ATLAS, and PAPI. He has published over 400 articles, papers, reports and technical memorandum and he is coauthor of several books.
Torsten Hoefler
Professor of Computer Science, ETH Zurich
Torsten Hoefler is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and ELLIS. His research interests revolve around the central topic of "Performance-centric System Design" and include scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling. Torsten won best paper awards at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference SC10, SC13, SC14, SC19, SC22, SC23, SC24, HPDC'15, IEEE TPDS'25, HPDC'16, IPDPS'15, and other conferences. He published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific conference and journal articles and authored chapters of the MPI-2.2 and MPI-3.0 standards. He received the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Award, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the ISC Jack Dongarra award, the Latsis prize of ETH Zurich, as well as the German Max-Planck Humboldt Medal. Additional information about Torsten can be found on his homepage at htor.ethz.ch.
Satoshi Matsuoka
Director, RIKEN's Center for Computational Science
Satoshi Matsuoka is the Director of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Japan, where he leads the development and operation of the flagship Fugaku supercomputer. He is a renowned computer scientist and thought leader in high-performance computing, with a focus on large-scale parallel systems, AI integration, and energy efficiency. He previously led the development of the TSUBAME series of supercomputers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
His most famous awards include:
ACM Gordon Bell Prizes (2011, 2021): The most prestigious award in the field of supercomputing. He is a two-time winner.
IEEE-CS Sidney Fernbach Award (2014): One of the highest honors in the field of HPC.
IEEE-CS Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award (2022): The highest award in computer engineering and supercomputing, making him the only individual to receive both the Fernbach and Seymour Cray awards.
Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon (2022): A prestigious commendation from the Emperor of Japan for his academic and scientific contributions.
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