16th Workshop on AI and Scientific Computing at Scale using Flexible Computing Infrastructures
FLEXSCIENCE 2026
Cleveland, OH, USA, July 13, 2026
Cleveland, OH, USA, July 13, 2026
Location: Tinkham Veale University Center, Case Western Reserve University, Second Floor Conference Room
09:00 - 10:30 Session 1, Chair: Bogdan Nicolae
09:00 - 09:10 Opening
09:10 - 10:00 Keynote: Osamu Tatebe - Storage challenges for more bandwidth and IOPS
10:00 - 10:30 Fault Tolerance of Accelerated Asynchronous Fixed-Point Iterations on Flexible Computing Infrastructure - Evan Coleman (University of Mary Washington), Masha Sosonkina (Old Dominion University)
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:30 Session 2, Chair: Kento Sato
11:00 - 11:30 Beyond Fixed Budgets: Characterizing the Inelasticity and Limitations of Tree-of-Thought Reasoning Strategies - Atkia Mahila (Rochester Institute of Technology), Avinash Maurya (Argonne National Laboratory), M. Mustafa Rafique (Rochester Institute of Technology), Bogdan Nicolae (Argonne National Laboratory)
11:30 - 12:00 Momentum-Buffered Local SGD for Zero-Payload Drift Correction in Federated Learning - Aizierjiang Aiersilan (The George Washington University)
12:30 - 13:00 Towards Transparent Checkpointing with AI-driven Code Generation - Hai Nguyen (Argonne National Laboratory), Tekin Bicer (Argonne National Laboratory), Kyle Chard (University of Chicago), Ian Foster (University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory), Bogdan Nicolae (Argonne National Laboratory)
Abstract
HPC file systems have evolved to bridge the gap between computational and storage system performance, with the aim of achieving higher bandwidth and IOPS. This talk will introduce this research and these developments, focusing particularly on ad-hoc and caching file systems. An ad-hoc file system is a parallel, distributed system that uses the local storage of compute nodes. Increasing the number of compute nodes can enhance the performance of the storage system. As ad-hoc file systems are configured after job allocation, data must be transferred to and from the back-end, persistent, parallel file system. Manually transferring data is susceptible to errors. Caching file systems could solve this problem, but implementing caching functionality while maintaining the high performance of an ad-hoc file system presents several challenges. This talk introduces several methods for addressing these challenges.
Bio
Osamu Tatebe received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Tokyo in 1997. He worked at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) until 2006. He is currently a professor at the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Tsukuba. Since 2000, he has led the research and development of the Gfarm file system, which is currently used in a nationwide 100PB HPCI shared storage infrastructure in Japan. He is presently engaged in the exploration of the next generation of high performance computing (HPC) storage architecture. He has received awards in the SC2003 High Performance Bandwidth Challenge, the SC2005 StorCloud Challenge, and the SC2006 Storage Challenge. His research interests include HPC storage architecture and HPC system software.
Scientific computing applications generate enormous datasets that are continuously increasing exponentially in both complexity and volume, making their analysis, archival, and sharing one of the grand challenges of modern big data analytics. Supported by the rise of artificial intelligence and deep learning, such enormous datasets are becoming valuable resources even beyond their original scope, opening new opportunities to learn patterns and extract new knowledge at large scale, potentially without human intervention. However, this leads to an increasing complexity of the workflows that combine traditional HPC simulations with big data analytics and AI workloads. An initial wave that opened this direction was the shift from compute-intensive to data-intensive, which saw several ideas from big data analytics (in-situ processing, shipping computations close to data, complex and dynamic workflows) fused with the tightly coupled patterns needed by the HPC ecosystem. AI workloads have brought additional challenges to tightly coupled patterns: irregular I/O (small, scattered reads/writes), relaxed collectives (e.g. tolerant to stragglers), accelerator-centric optimizations, parallelization strategies, agentic workflows, etc. In a quest to keep up with these new challenges, the design and operation of the infrastructures capable of running them efficiently at scale has evolved accordingly. Extreme heterogeneity at all levels (combinations of CPUs and accelerators, various types of memories and local storage and network links, parallel file systems and object stores, etc.) is now the norm. Ideas pioneered by cloud and edge computing (aspects related to elasticity, multi-tenancy, geo-distributed processing, stream computing) are also beginning to be adopted in the HPC ecosystem (containerized workflows, on-demand jobs to complement batch jobs, streaming of experimental data from instruments directly to supercomputers, etc.). Thus, modern scientific applications need to be integrated into an entire AI-Enabled Compute Continuum from the edge all the way to supercomputers and large data-centers using flexible infrastructures and middlewares.
The 16th workshop on AI and Scientific Computing at Scale using Flexible Computing Infrastructures (FlexScience) will provide the scientific community a dedicated forum for discussing new research, development, and deployment efforts in running scientific computing workloads in such flexible ecosystems, across the Computing Continuum, focusing on emerging technologies and new convergence challenges that are not sufficiently addressed by the current generation of supercomputers and dedicated data centers. The workshop aims to address questions such as: what architectural changes to existing frameworks (hardware, operating systems, networking and/or programming models) are needed to support flexible computing? Dynamic information derived from remote instruments, coupled simulations, and sensor ensembles that stream data for real-time analysis and machine learning are important emerging trends. How can we leverage and adapt to these patterns? What scientific workloads are suitable candidates to take advantage of heterogeneity, elasticity and/or on-demand resources? What factors are limiting the adoption of a flexible design? The workshop encourages interaction and cross-pollination between participants that are developing applications, algorithms, middleware and infrastructure and that are facing new challenges and opportunities to take advantage of flexible computing. The workshop will be an excellent place to help the community define the current state, determine future goals, and discuss promising technologies and techniques
Complex workflows at the intersection of HPC, Big Data and AI
Agentic AI workflows (shared agentic memory, tool invocation using MCP, reasoning strategies, etc)
Experimental evaluations of porting HPC/AI applications to clouds and reconfigurable data centers
Techniques to federate workflows and resources across distributed data centers, HPC machines and the edge
Scalable, Secure and reliable federated learning in distributed environments (HPC systems, edge devices)
Elastic infrastructures that combine HPC data centers and/or clouds (bursting, data sharing)
Performance portability and related abstractions to hide the heterogeneity of resources
Scalability and fine-tuning of high-performance AI and deep learning frameworks for elastic use of resources (e.g., Tensorflow, PyTorch, Horovod on a variable number of GPUs.)
Virtualization, containers, and dynamic provisioning
Elastic I/O, storage and data management services and architectures (caching, prefetching, adaptations of building blocks such as NoSQL databases and parallel file systems, etc.)
AI data pipelines, AI model repositories, AI storage techniques (async checkpointing, incremental transfer learning with frozen weights, provenance metadata, etc.)
Scalable Inferences and model serving (retrieval augmented generation, batched inferences, KV caching, etc.)
Fault tolerance and reliability under dynamic provisioning of resources
Analysis of management complexity, cost, and variability of heterogeneous resources
Paper submission deadline: April 26, 2026 May 4, 2026 (firm)
Paper notification: May 9, 2026
Camera ready papers: May 16, 2026
Workshop: July 16, 2026
Authors are invited to submit:
Short 5-page papers
Regular 8-page papers
Authors are invited to submit papers describing unpublished, original research. All submitted manuscripts should be formatted using the ACM Master Template with sigconf format (please be sure to use the current version). All necessary documentation can be found at: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Workshop papers can be either short (max 5 pages) or regular (max 8 pages). Both types will receive equal consideration. All papers must be in English. We use single-blind reviewing process, so please keep the authors names, publications, etc., in the text.
Papers will be peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as part of the ACM Digital Library.
Papers conforming to these guidelines should be submitted through HotCRP.
Alexandru Costan, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania (alexandru.costan@upb.ro)
Bogdan Nicolae, Argonne National Laboratory, USA (bogdan.nicolae@acm.org)
Kento Sato, RIKEN Center, Japan (kento.sato@riken.jp)
Michael Sevilla, University of Santa Cruz, USA
Dongfang Zhao, University of Nevada, USA
Elena Apostol, Universitatea Politehnica Bucharest, Romania
Kevin Brown, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Ryan Chard, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Teng Wang, Florida State University, USA
Ke Cui, RIKEN, Japan
Sandeep Palur, Apple, USA
Radu Prodan, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Mustafa Rafique, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Michael Schoettner, University of Duesseldorf, Germany