Workshop Announcement: Productive, Performant Software for Large Scale Scientific Data Analysis
Elliott Slaughter
Productive, Performant Software for Large Scale Scientific Data Analysis
October 21–22, 2025
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Virtual and In-Person Options Available
Registration deadline: October 9, 2025
Workshop dates: October 21–22, 2025
Scientific user facilities (SUFs) at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) drive scientific discovery and innovation by delivering world-class experimental capabilities that expand the frontiers of biology, chemistry, physics, and materials science. Over the next 5 years, upgrades at SUFs will generate over an order of magnitude more data, promising to accelerate the pace of scientific innovation if correctly harnessed. However, this flood of data poses challenges for the scientific community, despite continued growth in HPC hardware performance. The current state of the practice and tools optimized for HPC are insufficiently flexible and productive to address the high-stakes, short timelines, and rapidly evolving requirements of highly dynamic scientific user experiments. Additionally, traditional HPC software tools demand expertise that most users of SUFs cannot realistically apply within the pace and pressures of modern experiments, underscoring the need for more accessible, high-productivity approaches. Emerging AI/ML technologies, though promising, do not address these needs, and will not lead to a productive, high-performance software ecosystem without decisive action.
This workshop will explore the research challenges and opportunities in building a highly productive, high-performance software ecosystem for large scale scientific data analysis for users at the SUFs. The goal of the workshop is to identify key research directions that, if addressed, would substantially change the status quo and deliver an order of magnitude increase in productivity and performance for users of SUFs across the DOE complex.
An agenda is available at: https://lssda.github.io/agenda
Plenary Speakers
Ben Brown (DOE)
Jana Thayer (SLAC)
Nicholas Sauter and David Mittan-Moreau (LBL)
Important Dates
Registration deadline: October 9, 2025
Workshop dates: October 21–22, 2025
Location and Travel
The workshop will be held at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, CA. Parking is available for free on site. Note that registration is required for all attendees and that all visitors must present valid identification when entering SLAC: https://lssda.github.io/register
Attendees may book at the Stanford Guest House (subject to availability). Additional hotels may be available in the area: https://lssda.github.io/lodging
The workshop will be held in the Redwood conference room (A/B/C/D), located in building 048. A map of SLAC is available at: https://vue.slac.stanford.edu/meeting-rooms
Organizing Committee
Alex Aiken (Stanford/SLAC)
Elliott Slaughter (SLAC)
Johannes Blaschke (NERSC)
Keita Teranishi (ORNL)
Patrick McCormick (LANL)
Roberto Gioiosa (PNNL)