2025 ICL Retreat
The 2025 ICL Retreat was held on August 14 at Ijams Nature Center. Each group member presented slides on their current projects, giving everyone an opportunity to share progress and stay informed about the full range of work at ICL. The agenda also included group discussions centered on two guiding questions: How can we improve our skills? and How can we strengthen collaboration?
ICL Awarded NSF POSE Grant for PaRSEC Ecosystem, Seeks to Understand Community Needs
ICL has received a $300,000 award from the National Science Foundation’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program to support the FOREST (Fostering an Open-Source Runtime Eco-System for the Task-based system PaRSEC) initiative. The one-year project (July 15, 2025 – June 30, 2026) focuses on transitioning PaRSEC into a sustainable, distributed open-source ecosystem with a broader base of contributors and users. As the PaRSEC development team has grown more geographically and institutionally distributed, FOREST will establish new models for collaboration and governance to ensure long-term sustainability. The initiative will support ongoing research in distributed runtime systems and expand support for scientific applications and libraries, enabling greater flexibility and performance. By fostering a stronger community of contributors and preparing a durable development model, FOREST aims to ensure that PaRSEC continues to serve existing users while reaching new NSF user communities as a high-performance platform for computational science.
Looking Ahead to SC25
The annual International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC25) will be held November 16–21, 2025, in St. Louis, Missouri. ICL will once again have a presence, with faculty, staff, and students contributing to workshops, Birds of a Feather sessions, and panels throughout the week. Below is a schedule of events where ICL members are participating.
Sunday, 16 November 2025
Monday, 17 November 2025
Tuesday, 18 November 2025
Wednesday, 19 November 2025
Thursday, 20 November 2025
Jack Dongarra on the Future of Supercomputing
Jack Dongarra in Lindau in July 2025. Photograph: Patrick Kunkel/Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings
WIRED magazine recently featured an interview with ICL founder and Turing Award laureate Jack Dongarra, highlighting his forward-looking perspective on the future of supercomputing. Speaking at the 74th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany, Dongarra reflected on the convergence of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, the challenges and potential of quantum computing, and the global competition shaping next-generation technologies.
AI is also going to have an impact beyond science—it’s going to be more important than the internet was when it arrived. It’s going to be so pervasive in what we do. It’s going to be used in so many ways that we haven’t really discovered today. It’s going to serve more of a purpose than the internet has played in the past 15, 20 years.
Jack Dongarra Makes the Case for Sustained Support in Computing
In a recent Communications of the ACM article, ICL founder Jack Dongarra reflects on how sustained U.S. federal investment has powered advances in computing and computational science. From early software libraries like EISPACK and LINPACK to modern HPC frameworks such as ScaLAPACK, MAGMA, and SLATE, federal funding has built the infrastructure, workforce, and innovation pipelines that drive scientific discovery. The article considers today’s challenges and policy gaps, making a compelling case for continued long-term support to maintain global leadership in high-performance computing.
Shaping the Code of Tomorrow: An Interview with Turing Laureate Prof Jack Dongarra
Jack Dongarra recently sat down with PhD students from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University Institute of Advanced Studies for a wide-ranging interview, now available on the IAS YouTube channel. In the discussion, he reflects on the evolution of high-performance computing, the importance of open science, the future of AI, and offers career advice and inspiration for the next generation of researchers.
ICL Student Completes Summer Internship at Amazon
This summer, ICL student Dong Jun Woun completed a research internship with Amazon’s Project Kuiper, an initiative to deploy a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband connectivity worldwide. While at Amazon, Jun worked on an automated testing infrastructure for Project Kuiper. By reducing manual testing and integrating continuous integration/continuous delivery capabilities, his contributions helped accelerate release cycles, enhance software quality, and lay the groundwork for broader automation across the project.
Congratulations
Anzt Garners Best Paper Award
We are proud to share that Hartwig Anzt, along with co-authors Axel Huebl and Xiaoye S. Li, received a 2024 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Computer Society Publications Board. Their paper, “Then and Now: Improving Software Portability, Productivity, and 100× Performance,” was published in IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering as part of a special Exascale Computing Project issue titled Transforming Science Through Software: Improving While Delivering 100×. This recognition highlights Hartwig’s continued leadership in advancing high-performance computing and software productivity. Congratulations, Hartwig, on this well-deserved honor!
Conference Reports
2025 SIAM Annual Meeting
The 2025 SIAM Annual Meeting was held July 28–August 1 , 2025 at the Montréal Convention Center in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. To kick off the meeting as the first mini-symposium presentation, Piotr gave a talk on Pivoting Avoiding QR (PAQR), on which ICL had a paper at IPDPS 2023, in a session on Recent Advances in QR Factorizations. Mark gave a talk on distributed linear and least squares solvers in SLATE, as part of the 3-part mini-symposium on Math Software Packages for HPC. The sessions also included an overview of the xSDK collection of math libraries, and talks about Amrex, SUNDIALS, Deal-II, Hypre, STRUMPACK, and SuperLU Dist. ICL Alum Ichi Yamazaki presented Frosch, a Domain Decomposition Library in Trilinos.
2025 NSF CSSI Meeting
Anthony Danalis represented ICL at the 2025 NSF CSSI Meeting in Denver, Colorado July 27-29. Anthony presented a poster on the SPADE project and caught up with ICL alumni Henri Casanova and Julien Langou who were also in attendance.
Tatiana Melnichenko Presents Poster at SMC25
ICL student Tatiana Melnichenko presented her poster, “Mojo: a Python-like, productive language for GPU-portable scientific high-performance computing,” at the Early Career Poster Session of the 2025 Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference (SMC25), hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory August 25-28. Her work evaluates Mojo, a new Python-like language that aims to combine Python’s ease of use with the performance demands of GPU-accelerated computing. By benchmarking Mojo against vendor-specific C++ implementations on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, her results show that Mojo can deliver portable performance comparable to traditional approaches—highlighting its potential as a productive tool for scientific HPC.
Interview
Dayle Flanigan
Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from and what was your professional
background before joining ICL?
I am from Knoxville, TN. Other than about 5 years of living in Cleveland/Chattanooga area, I have lived in Knoxville. I graduated from UTK in 2003, with a degree in Psychology. I have had the privilege to work in lots of different places. Most recently Amazon and Duraline.
How did you first learn about ICL and what is your role in the group?
Tonya Wimberley introduced me to ICL. She called me up to let me know that ICL was hiring, and she thought I should apply. I have now been with ICL for just over a year in the role of Financial Assistant.
What do you enjoy most about working at ICL?
I have really enjoyed being back on campus and meeting the “family” of ICL. It is fun to hear the stories and antics of ICL past. I look forward to many more years of coffee stories!
If you could have any job in the world, what would it be and why?
Honestly, if I could sit and get paid to talk to people, I think I would enjoy that. I don’t want to sell them anything, or fix problems, just talk. Learn about their story!
What are some of your interests/hobbies outside of work?
Besides being a “Boy Mom,” I enjoy going to concerts, being in the mountains, and going to UT Football games. I love to travel and see new places and meet new people. I like to try to new restaurants and make memories with friends and family.
What is something that might surprise people to know about you?
I grew up on a farm with horses and cows. We used to catch crawdads in the creek. I learned how to drive on a tractor and a golf cart! The rule was you had to be able to touch the gas pedal and the brake to be able to drive it. The lawn mower was always something I looked forward to driving too! We raced go carts and bicycles. Usually, you could find us in the cow field, building ramps to jump our bikes or chasing each other with cow patties! Fortunately, my sister and I have been able to keep the land we grew up on and hope to pass that legacy forward.
