HPSF Community Summit 2026 at TU Braunschweig

28 Februar 2026

The first edition of the HPSF Community Summit brought together 28 participants from Europe and the United States for a focused exchange on high-performance simulation frameworks and their evolving ecosystem. The workshop provided a platform for developers and users to discuss recent advances, strategic directions, and emerging challenges in scientific computing. The event took place at TU Braunschweig on Feb 25 - 27, 2026. It was organized under the umbrella of the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). HPSF supports projects that advance portable software for diverse hardware by increasing adoption, aiding community growth, and enabling development efforts. HPSF is lowering barriers to productive use of today’s and future high-performance computing systems. It is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. The workshop has been co-organized by Dr.-Ing. Matthias Mayr, highlighting not only UniBw M' associate membership in the HPSF, but also IMCS's contributions and commitments to high-performance software tools such as Trilinos.

A central component of the workshop program was a series of project updates from key initiatives within the HPSF landscape: Trilinos, Spack, Kokkos, AMReX & WarpX. Core developers presented recent technical developments, ongoing refactoring efforts, performance portability strategies, and roadmap perspectives. These updates stimulated in-depth discussions on interoperability, sustainability, and community governance.

In addition to the project overviews, the workshop featured numerous developer and user talks. These contributions highlighted practical experiences, integration strategies, application case studies, and lessons learned in deploying modern simulation software on contemporary HPC architectures. The diversity of perspectives ranging from framework design to domain-specific applications fostered constructive exchanges between software architects and end users.

A particular highlight of the summit was the keynote lecture by Prof. Hartwig Anzt (TU Munich) entitled “Hardware is Changing – Do We Need to Change the Way We Design Simulation Software?” The keynote addressed the rapidly evolving hardware landscape, including heterogeneous architectures and accelerator-based systems. It particularly shed light on the recent trend of increasing lower-precision GPU architectures designed for AI / ML workloads and explored their impact on software development for high-performance scientific computing.

Overall, the HPSF Community Summit successfully strengthened connections within the community, encouraged cross-project dialogue, and reinforced the importance of collaborative development in sustaining high-performance simulation software. The discussions underscored both the technical progress achieved and the strategic challenges that lie ahead as hardware architectures and scientific demands continue to evolve.

^{Photo: Participants of the HPSF Community Summit 2026 at TU Braunschweig (Copyright: Matthias Mayr)}