ICICLE at SC’25 “HPC Ignites”: Advancing Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure for Real-World Science

November 2025 — The ICICLE team traveled to St. Louis, Missouri for SC’25, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. This year’s theme, “HPC Ignites,” highlighted how advanced computing is sparking new solutions for urgent global challenges — from climate resilience to food systems, digital health, and sustainable infrastructure.

Sharing Research and Technical Advances

ICICLE researchers were active throughout SC’25, contributing work that bridges the gap between field-deployed computing and large-scale HPC systems. The focus: how AI-augmented cyberinfrastructure can automate complex scientific workflows, improving scheduling, model updating, and deployment across computing environments — reducing trial-and-error in model development and helping computational resources be used more efficiently.

I represented ICICLE in the SC’25 Doctoral Showcase, presenting both a poster and a technical talk on AI-Driven Resource Optimization for HPC Workflows. I also delivered an Extended Abstract Lightning Talk as part of the Women in HPC workshop, highlighting ICICLE’s commitment to fostering an inclusive and innovative computing community.

At The Ohio State University exhibit, Dr. Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda provided an overview of the ICICLE project and recent work from NOWLAB, demonstrating how integrating AI with HPC leads to more agile, energy-efficient, and scalable systems for modern scientific computing.

Digital Agriculture and Domain Impact

ICICLE’s mission extends beyond HPC research — it applies computation to societally critical fields. This was reflected in the “Agriculture Empowered by Supercomputing” Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session, where Dr. Panda joined distinguished speakers to discuss how computing power is transforming food systems.

The discussion highlighted the need for climate-smart farming, real-time crop and soil modeling, data-driven food supply chains, and scalable AI for food resilience. This domain-centric perspective aligns with a core ICICLE aim: democratizing intelligent computing for communities, ecosystems, and sustainable agriculture.

Hands-On Engagement Through SCinet

ICICLE’s presence extended beyond the technical program through participation in SCinet — the high-performance network that supports the entire conference and is one of the fastest temporary networks in the world. ICICLE NextGens volunteered in deploying and operating SCinet, gaining hands-on experience in large-scale infrastructure design and monitoring. This directly supports ICICLE’s mission to build cyberinfrastructure that is practical, scalable, and ready for real-world use.

Looking Ahead: Ideas Ignited

Conversations in St. Louis reinforced a shared vision: HPC and AI must work together to create infrastructure that learns from scientific workflows, adapts automatically, and scales from small field devices to national supercomputers. ICICLE continues to make this possible by integrating intelligent scheduling, science gateways, edge computing, and reproducibility into a unified, human-centered framework for scientific computing.

It was inspiring to engage with collaborators, students, industry partners, and researchers across the HPC community. We look forward to seeing how the ideas ignited at SC’25 continue to evolve.