March 20, 2024 — The Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University hosted the 17th annual Energy High Performance Computing (HPC) Conference on March 5-7 at the BioScience Research Collaborative, welcoming over 560 guests to Rice from 30 states and 11 countries.

The Institute collaborated with Keith Gray, conference co-founder and Oil & Gas HPC Architect at Intel, along with an interdisciplinary planning committee to build this year’s program based on current trends, needs, challenges and opportunities in HPC and the energy industry.

“The Energy HPC Conference is a community that comes together, sharing best practices and finding solutions to help develop the world’s energy supply chain — from atom-scale to Earth-scale — through HPC,” said committee member Donny Cooper, TotalEnergies.

The conference featured a lineup of invited speakers, panels, technical talks and “birds of a feather” sessions that combined diverse insights and perspectives from industry, academia and national labs. Attendees also had the opportunity to engage with over 30 exhibitors during networking breaks and afternoon receptions, followed by poster presentations and four add-on workshops.

Invited speakers at day one of the 2024 Energy HPC Conference included Kirk Bresniker (Hewlett Packard Labs), Dan Stanzione (TACC), Mike Hereoux (Sandia National Laboratories), Tao Sun (Chevron Technical Center), and Detlef Hohl (Shell).

Day two included Christy Cardenas (Grit Ventures) and the 2023 ACM/IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award recipient Keshav Pingali, along with Rice University’s Executive Vice President for Research Ramamoorthy Ramesh and Noah Harding Assistant Professor of Computer Science Tasos Kyrillidis.

To close out the conference, a panel of committee members joined together to elaborate on the importance of collaboration, highlighting successes, challenges and perspectives on how the influence of the Department of Energy’s influence might transform energy and HPC. Panelists included David Baldwin (Shell), Alex Loddoch (Chevron), Nefeli Moridis (NVIDIA), Suzy Tichenor (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and David Martin (Argonne National Laboratory), who noted that the conference is “a great benefit to the national labs as a place to meet industry, share lessons learned and establish collaborations” across the energy sector.

Notable additions to this year’s conference were numerous sessions focused on the rise of artificial intelligence in transforming the energy landscape. Speakers explored trends and possibilities at the intersection of HPC and AI, discussing the future of the energy transition, open software ecosystems and responsible applications to improve efficiency and optimization.

Additionally, Samantha Nava of the Ken Kennedy Institute united with a cohort of specialists and engineers to convene a workshop titled “AI in Energy.” This endeavor aimed to meticulously examine the feasibility of implementing secure and synergistic artificial intelligence technologies within the energy industry.

“The Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University is committed to supporting cutting-edge research, educating innovators and connecting across industries by bringing together thought leaders from our regional and global energy, AI and high-performance computing communities,” said Lydia Kavraki, professor of Computer Science and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute. “The conference serves as a forum to initiate collaborations and explore technological innovation to address demands in energy, computing, AI and more.”

Recordings from the 2024 Energy HPC Conference are available on the Ken Kennedy Institute’s YouTube channel.

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Source: Silvia Cernea Clark, Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University