CAKE at ISC25: Highlights and Looking to the Future
The ISC High Performance Conference is one of the leading international conferences for high performance computing (HPC), bringing together a diverse mixture of HPC vendors, research institutions, academia, industry professionals, and everyone in between.
The week was packed with specialist workshops, great talks, poster sessions (did you come and check out our CAKE poster?), a huge exhibition space and networking events. Highlights of the latter include the Women in HPC community and the delightfully quirky HPC Gelato Group (yes - real gelato!). ISC really is the place to learn about the world of HPC - from cutting-edge research to emerging challenges to the future direction of our field. And of course, Hamburg is a wonderful place to visit!
Planning for the future:
Whilst the CAKE network is still relatively new (we are working super hard behind the scenes to bring our planned vision to life!), it was incredibly important for us to be at ISC25. As a key global knowledge exchange event, ISC aligns perfectly with CAKE’s mission: to enable and coordinate international visibility and collaboration across the UK DRI landscape. This year, at ISC25, our goal was simple: to listen, learn and lay the foundations for a greater level of UK-wide visibility, coordination and sense of community at future conferences.
We know that the UK DRI voice is already present at ISC and similar events:
- A small number of UK centres have booths,
- Key leaders in the community are integral to the organisation of recurring workshops or Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions,
- Brilliant UK-based researchers regularly present their work
But right now, this voice isn’t coherent or connected. It lacks a shared identity and, more importantly, an accessible route for wider participation.
To address this gap, CAKE will organise and host a central booth at key national and international conferences like ISC and SC. This will be a space open to all within the UK DRI community, providing a platform for showcasing the UK’s contributions to the international HPC community, a central meeting point for networking and collaboration, and a space for project talks and presentations.
We’ll continue to support and work alongside existing UK booths, ensuring our efforts are complementary - not competitive - and help present a joined-up, inclusive UK presence to the global HPC community.
Watch this space!
Here are some ISC25 stand-outs from the CAKE team:
- Women in HPC (WHPC)
- The WHPC community showed up loud and vibrant throughout the conference! This was organised through collaboration with the ISC conference itself, as well as UK and German WHPC representatives. Read more in Eleanor’s blog post here.
- HPC Around the World
- We loved seeing ISC lean into a truly international scope through the HPC Around the World sessions, spotlighting regions often underrepresented in global HPC conversations: Latin America, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East.
- Quantum Computing: Widely represented but under-discussed?
- An impressive 22% of exhibitors identified as working in quantum computing, a clear signal of the field’s growing relevance. However, this wasn’t reflected as strongly in the technical programme.
- JUPITER Debuts at #4
- The European JUPITER supercomputer entered the Top500 list at #4. It didn’t quite break the exascale barrier — but it’s worth noting this was achieved while only using 79% of its nodes. Watch this space…
- Zettascale
- Exascale kind of already feels like yesterday’s news! Several keynote and panel speakers are already looking ahead to zettascale computing. But, alongside this comes the obvious questions: Do we really need them, and at what cost?
- Sustainability
- As the community continues to push for bigger and faster supercomputers, the issue of sustainability is more pressing than ever. From power consumption to cooling and system design, the challenge is still: how do we scale HPC responsibly?
Written by: Eleanor Broadway
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