Agenda
Sunday, August 30, 2026
| 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. | Welcome Reception (*Optional) *Heavy hors d’oeuvres served in lieu of dinner | Conference Hotel Lobby |
Monday, August 31, 2026
| 7:30 – 8:30 a.m. | Registration | |
| 8:30 – 8:45 a.m. | Welcome to SMC 26 Gina Tourassi, CCSD Associate Laboratory Director *Working Breakfast | General Session |
| 8:45 – 9:00 a.m. | Introduction to Session I: Genesis Mission Brian Etz, ORNL Thomas Naughton, ORNL | General Session |
| 9:00 – 9:45 a.m. | Genesis Mission Overview Presentation Title: Coming Soon Brian Spears, LLNL | General Session |
| 9:45 – 10:00 a.m. | Morning Break | |
| 10:00 – 10:45 a.m. | Genesis Platform (AmSc) Co-Presented Building the American Science Cloud: Federated Services, Zero-Trust Architecture, and Early Lessons Debbie Bard, LBNL/NERSC Patrick Huck, LBNL/HPDF | General Session |
| 10:45 – 11:15 a.m. | ModCon Core Agentic Framework Presentation Title: ModCon Core: A Framework for Persistent, Observable, and Collaborative AI Agents Ian Foster, ANL | General Session |
| 11:15 – 11:45 a.m. | SUF Infrastructure Partner Integration Presentation Title: Enabling Next-Generation AI-Driven Discovery at the Scientific User Facilities with the American Science Cloud Nicholas Schwarz, ANL | General Session |
| 11:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. | Genesis Applications Presentation Title: Genesis Mission Platform and National Security Applications Siva Rajamanickam, SNL | General Session |
| 12:15 – 1:45 p.m. | Diamond Sponsor Presentations First Speaker: Dustin Sell, Google Presentation Title: Google Antigravity – Accelerating Scientific Discovery through Agentic Workflows Second speaker: Martin Suchara, IonQ Presentation Title: Engineering Quantum Impact: Systems, Scaling, and Scientific Applications *Working Lunch | General Session |
| 1:45 – 2:00 p.m. | Introduction to Session II: AI Enabling the Future of Advanced Scientific Computing John Gounley, ORNL Massimiliano (Max) Lupo Pasini, ORNL | General Session |
| 2:00 – 2:30 p.m. | Presentation Title: A Scalable Agentic Artificial Intelligence Scientific Workflow for Atomistic Materials Characterization Massimiliano Lupo Pasini, ORNL | General Session |
| 2:30 – 3:00 p.m. | Presentation Title: GridAI: Foundation Models and Agentic AI for the Nation’s Power Grid Kibaek Kim, ANL | General Session |
| 3:00 – 3:15 p.m. | Afternoon Break | |
| 3:15 – 3:45 p.m. | Presentation Title: Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Discovery Markus Buehler, MIT | General Session |
| 3:45 – 4:15 p.m. | Presentation Title: Towards scientific superintelligence: autonomous agentic frameworks for accelerated materials discovery Victor Fung, LILA | General Session |
| 4:15 – 4:45 p.m. | Session II Panel Discussion Moderators: John Gounley, ORNL Massimiliano (Max) Lupo Pasini, ORNL | General Session |
| 4:45 – 5:00 p.m. | Group Photo | |
| 5:00 – 7:30 p.m. | SMC 26 Keynote Panel Presentation Moderator: Gina Tourassi, ORNL Panelists: Curt Jawdy, TVA Kelly Rose, DOE Brian Spears, LLNL Rangan Sukumar, AMD Nick Wright, NVIDIA *Working Dinner | General Session |
Tuesday, September 1, 2026
| 8:00 – 8:30 a.m. | Registration | |
| 8:30 – 8:45 a.m. | Recap of Day 1 and Review Agenda for Day 2 Heidi Hanson, SMC 26 Co-Chair *Working Breakfast | General Session |
| 8:45 – 9:00 a.m. | Introduction to Session III: Autonomous and Agentic Scientific Labs Stephen DeWitt, ORNL Ben Mintz, ORNL | General Session |
| 9:00 – 9:20 a.m. | Presentation Title: Choosing Wisely: Paths Toward Insight-Maximizing Autonomy in Materials Discovery Chris Stiles, Johns Hopkins | General Session |
| 9:20 – 9:40 a.m. | Presentation Title: Prometheus – Nuclear Energy Faster, Safer, Cheaper Zachary Prince, INL | General Session |
| 9:40 – 10:00 a.m. | Presentation Title: Automating the 3D Characterization Pipeline for High-Throughput Microstructure Quantification David Rowenhorst, NRL | General Session |
| 10:00 – 10:15 a.m. | Morning Break | |
| 10:15 – 10:35 a.m. | Presentation Title: Advancing AI-enabled scientific workflows at user facilities Tanny Chavez, LBNL | General Session |
| 10:35 – 10:55 a.m. | Presentation Title: AI-driven Materials Synthesis and Agentic Characterization at the ACL Craig Bridges, ORNL | General Session |
| 10:55 – 11:25 a.m. | Session III Panel Discussion Moderators: Stephen DeWitt, ORNL Ben Mintz, ORNL | General Session |
| 11:25 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. | Diamond Sponsor Presentations First Speaker: Bob Ciotti, CTG Federal Presentation Title: Bridging the Gap: Evolving U.S. Government Supercomputing Strategies in the Hyperscaler Era Second Speaker: Robert Wisniewski, HPE Presentation Title: Embracing Heterogeneity *Working Lunch | General Session |
| 1:00 – 1:15 p.m. | Session IV: Digital Twins and Physics- informed Predictive Science Wes Brewer, ORNL Dan Lu, ORNL | General Session |
| 1:15 – 1:45 p.m. | Presentation Title: Doppleganger: Building Block Components and Services for Building Digital Twins Shantenu Jha, PPPL | General Session |
| 1:45 – 2:15 p.m. | Presentation Title: MATEY: A Multiscale Transformer Foundation Model for Diverse Physical Systems Pei Zhang, ORNL | General Session |
| 2:15 – 2:45 p.m. | Presentation Title: The DIII-D Digital Twin: Uniting AI Surrogates, Experimental Data, and DOE HPC for Fusion Operations Garrett Prechel, General Atomics | General Session |
| 2:45 – 3:15 p.m. | Presentation Title: Toward an Autonomous Data Center Fabric: Physics-Informed Digital Twins, Agentic AI, and High-Assurance Control Soumyendu Sarkar, HPE | General Session |
| 3:15 – 3:30 p.m. | Afternoon Break | |
| 3:30 – 4:00 p.m. | Session IV: Panel Discussion Moderators: Wes Brewer, ORNL Dan Lu, ORNL | General Session |
| 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. | Featured Session: Contributed Talks Group I – AI-Enabled Scientific Discovery, Digital Twins, and Autonomous Workflows Designing Systems to Make the Most of Human-AI Collaboration – Curt Jawdy, TVA From Hypothesis Generation to Autonomous Laboratories: Trustworthy AI Co-Scientists for the Genesis Era – Tirthankar Ghosal, ORNL Fantastic Scientific Agents and How to Build Them: From Workflow (R)evolution to Autonomous Labs – Woong Shin, ORNL Digital Twins for the Material Plasma Exposure eXperiment (MPEX) – Rick Archibald, ORNL | General Session |
| 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. | Featured Session: Contributed Talks Group II – Computing Foundations for HPC, Quantum, and AI Performance Portable Software Design Patterns – Blocks to Build the Future of High-Performance Computing Software – Jakob Bludau, ORNL Punctuated Equilibrium: Message Passing Middleware Design, Specification, and Implementation in the AI-Era – Anthony Skjellum, TTU LCLStream: High Throughput Data Streaming for AI Workflows and Next Generation X-ray Science – Valerio Mariani, SLAC Qudit-Based Scalable Quantum Algorithm for Solving the Integer Programming Problem – Rick Mukherjee, UT Chattanooga Purpose Built, AI Inference Platforms – Tim Clarke, Sambanova | Roy McDonald Jr. Ballroom |
| 5:30 p.m. | Adjourn | |
| 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. | Social Event at TN Aquarium *Heavy hors d’oeuvres in lieu of dinner | 1 Broad Street Chattanooga, TN 37402 |
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
| 8:00 – 8:30 a.m. | Registration | |
| 8:30 – 8:45 a.m. | Recap of Day 2 and Review Agenda for Day 3 Chris Fuson, ORNL, SMC 26 Co-Chair *Working Breakfast | General Session |
| 8:45 – 9:00 a.m. | Introduction to Session V: National Security Mark Adams, ORNL Amir Sadovnik, ORNL Scott Stewart, ORNL | General Session |
| 9:00 – 9:30 a.m. | Presentation Title: Coming Soon Brian Spears, LLNL | General Session |
| 9:30 – 10:00 a.m. | Presentation Title: Why Data is our Achilles Heel (and what we should do about it) Dana Grisham, SNL | General Session |
| 10:00 – 10:15 a.m. | Morning Break | |
| 10:15 – 10:45 a.m. | Presentation Title: Where Frontier AI Security and Cyber Are Heading: A Field Report Through a National Security Lens Mikel Rodriguez, MITRE | General Session |
| 10:45 – 11:15 a.m. | Presentation Title: Tools to Teammates: Cognitive Augmentation for Combat in the 21st Century Dan Javorsek, STIB | General Session |
| 11:15 – 11:45 a.m. | Session V Panel Discussion Moderators: Mark Adams, ORNL Amir Sadovnik, ORNL Scott Stewart, ORNL | General Session |
| 11:45 a.m. – 1:15 p.m. | Diamond Sponsor Presentations Speaker: Seetharami Seelam, IBM Presentation Title: An update on Quantum-Centric Supercomputing *Working Lunch | General Session |
| 1:15 – 1:30 p.m. | Session VI Introduction: Energy-smart computing and Next-gen Microelectronics Ashish Gautam, ORNL Narasinga Rao Miniskar, ORNL | General Session |
| 1:30 – 2:00 p.m. | Presentation Title: All Optical Analog Processor for Energy-Efficient HPC: Benchmarks and Real-World Applications Omri Wolf, Light Solver | General Session |
| 2:00 – 2:30 p.m. | Presentation Title: Beyond the Memory Wall: The Evolution of Memory Systems from Storage to Intelligent Computing Kazi Asifuzzamann, ORNL | General Session |
| 2:30 – 3:00 p.m. | Presentation Title: CMOS-Memristive Neuromorphic Systems: Pathways for Next Generation, Energy-Efficient Architectures Garrett Rose, UTK | General Session |
| 3:00 – 3:30 p.m. | Presentation Title: Following the Watt: End-to-End Energy Observability for AI and Exascale Computing Oscar Hernandez, ORNL | General Session |
| 3:30 – 3:45 p.m. | Afternoon Break | |
| 3:45 – 4:15 p.m. | Session VI Panel Discussion Moderators: Ashish Gautam, ORNL Narasinga Rao Miniskar, ORNL | General Session |
| 4:15 – 4:30 p.m. | Swag Pick-Up | Roy McDonald Jr. Ballroom |
| 4:30 p.m. | Adjourn *Dinner on your own |
Thursday, September 3, 2026
| 8:00 – 8:15 a.m. | Recap of Day 3 and Review Agenda for Day 4 Pedro Valero, ORNL, SMC 26 Co-Chair | General Session |
| 8:30 – 8:45 a.m. | ORNL Workforce Development Presentation Title: Workforce Development in the Era of HPC/AI and Quantum Computing Convergence Suzanne Parete-Koon, ORNL Chris Beatty, ORNL *Working Breakfast | General Session |
| 8:45 – 9:00 a.m. | Introduction to Session VII: Quantum Technologies Ashlyn Burch, ORNL Elaine Wong, ORNL | General Session |
| 9:00 – 9:30 a.m. | Presentation Title: Quantum Mechanics-Based Multitensor AI/ML Uniquely Able to Discover, Validate, and Interpret Predictors from Small-Cohort Noisy High-Dimensional Multiomic Data Orly Alter, Univ of Utah | General Session |
| 9:30 – 10:00 a.m. | Presentation Title: Building a Quantum-HPC Ecosystem Travis Humble, ORNL | General Session |
| 10:00 – 10:15 a.m. | Morning Break | |
| 10:15 – 10:45 a.m. | Presentation Title: Bridging High-Performance and Quantum Computing for End-to-End Battery Material Applications Mason Rhodes, Xanadu | General Session |
| 10:45 – 11:15 a.m. | Presentation Title: Resource Estimation and Code Selection via Dynamic Logical Scheduling for All-to-All Connected Quantum Architectures Tyler Leblond, Quantinuum | General Session |
| 11:15 – 11:45 a.m. | Session VII Panel Discussion Moderators: Ashlyn Burch, ORNL Elaine Wong, ORNL Guest Panelist: Nicholas Peters, ORNL | General Session |
| 11:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | SMC 26 Closeout Discussion SMC 26 Co-Chairs Chris Fuson, ORNL Heidi Hanson, ORNL Pedro Valero Lara, ORNL | General Session |