Keynotes ● Cluster 2026

Keynote 1: Wednesday, September 23rd

TBD

Venue: Boeing Auditorium, Virginia Tech

Keynote 2: Thursday, September 24th

Abstract

Scientific computing is increasingly a connected lifecycle in which experiments, data, high-performance computing, and AI work together to produce scientific results. Yet the final result is only the last page of the story: nondeterministic executions can diverge, AI models can reach similar answers through different learning trajectories, workflows can hide the origins of their outputs, and data, instruments, computing, and scientists increasingly operate across distributed facilities.

In this keynote, I will argue that trust in scientific computing requires a persistent “paper trail” that captures how a result came to be. Through four scenarios, I will show how graph-based analysis can expose and localize nondeterminism in HPC executions; how training histories and compact metadata can reveal how neural networks learn and enable earlier, more efficient decisions; how fine-grained provenance can connect scientific results to their data, software, models, parameters, and execution context; and how federated data ecosystems can extend this traceability across instruments, computing facilities, AI resources, and scientific communities. These examples point toward a future in which scientific results do not travel alone: they carry the evidence needed to reproduce, explain, evaluate, and reliably reuse them.

Biography

Michela Taufer, an AAAS Fellow and ACM Distinguished Scientist, is the MathWorks Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She earned her Laurea in Computer Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, and her doctoral degree in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Her postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego, and The Scripps Research Institute bridged computer systems and computational chemistry, underscoring her lifelong commitment to interdisciplinary research.

Throughout her career, Taufer has passionately combined computational and experimental sciences. Her cyberinfrastructure solutions leverage high-performance, cloud, and volunteer computing to advance scientific applications. An advocate for scientific rigor, she promotes reproducibility, replicability, and transparency across her projects. Taufer has held leadership roles in the HPC community, including serving as editor-in-chief of Future Generation Computer Systems and as a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).