Graduate Students Share Research and Systems Insights at SC25

At SC25, graduate students from our lab participated in poster sessions, workshops, panel discussions, and research demonstrations, engaging with researchers from universities, industry, and national laboratories across the HPC community.

Graduate student Colin Thomas presented a poster covering his work completed over the summer at NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The poster, titled “Inference-as-a-Service Prototype at NERSC,” was previously referenced in an earlier blog post. During the poster session, Colin received a number of visitors and had the opportunity to explain the work and answer questions. Attendees were largely interested in the policy decisions made in the inference service pipeline, such as the scaling of compute resources in response to the client demand and the support of multiple users making inferences to the same server.

Graduate student Ryan Hartung attended SC25 in St. Louis, where he participated in workshops, technical sessions, and discussions with researchers and practitioners from universities, corporations, and national laboratories around the world. He joined the XLOOP workshop on Sunday, where a member of the RADICAL-collaboration team presented the group’s paper on xGFabric. Later in the workshop, Ryan was selected to represent the team on the panel discussion “Bridging the Edge-to-Exascale Divide: Real-Time Scientific Workflows in the 5G Era,” alongside panelists from Nvidia, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

At the Department of Energy booth, Ryan demoed his research, showcasing a real-time interaction between a 5G network and an HPC simulation, supported by a presentation outlining the research problem, implementation, and end-to-end system design. A discussion with a national lab researcher highlighted potential for xGFabric as a reusable, domain-agnostic software stack, particularly for scenarios combining low-capacity sensors with large-scale HPC resources for adaptive, real-time science. These conversations led to new ideas, including scaling private 5G deployments to multi-site sensor federations and orchestrating large drone fleets for experiment-in-the-loop workflows.

Beyond formal sessions, Ryan engaged in conversations throughout the conference on topics such as AI–HPC integration, power-aware scheduling, quantum–HPC hybrid algorithms, in-memory processing fabrics, and cooling approaches for exascale systems. These interactions provided fresh perspectives on current challenges and reinforced emerging directions in storage, networking, AI integration, resilience, and sustainable computing.

Below are some nice photos they took during the conference:

It was an invigorating dive into the evolving world of high-performance computing at SC25. The conference provided valuable opportunities for our students to share their research, learn from peers, and explore new directions in HPC. We look forward to building on these connections and insights as we continue to advance the field of cooperative computing.