Stony Brook Workshop Explores the Future of AI and High-Performance Computing
Stony Brook, NY – May 12, 2025 – As part of hosting the Cray User Group Meeting, Stony Brook University recently hosted a two-day workshop on Expanding Horizons in AI with HPC, on May 9–10, 2025. The event, organized by Dr. Joseph Schuchart and Dr. Eva Siegmann of Stony Brook University, together with Dr. Shinjae Yoo of Brookhaven National Laboratory, was open to the public and brought together leading experts to explore the growing synergy between artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC). The workshop highlighted the significant potential of challenges of combining AI and HPC to accelerate scientific research and innovation at scale.
On the first day, Dr. Bill Tang – a prominent computational physicist from Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory – delivered the opening keynote, sharing his experience and vision for how machine learning and advanced HPC can together fast-track solutions to some of science’s toughest problems. Tang’s talk set an optimistic tone, illustrating how the use of AI in scientific computing has made important contributions towards the utilization of fusion energy for grid energy generation.
The day continued with overviews of AI-related activities at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a session on novel compute architectures for the scientific-AI era with presentations on current projects at Argonne National Laboratory, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. This was followed by presentations on the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) as tools to support the research community. The first day finished with a panel discussion covering the topics discussed throughout the day.
The second day was kicked off by a keynote by Prasanna Balaprakash, the lead of AI activities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His presentation included a broad overview of AI activities at ORNL and his vision for the future of AI in scientific computing, both at leadership scale and through the provision of pre-trained large models to academic researchers.
A session on the use of the integration of AI into HPC workflows with presentations from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Brookhaven National Laboratories. The day concluded with an outlook on the future of AI and scientific computing in the state of New York with an overview of EmpireAI by Dr Robert Harrison.
Overall, this mini symposium successfully brought together researchers and engineers from local University as well as nation-wide government labs and enterprises to discuss the challenges and opportunities of utilizing artificial intelligence in scientific research and computing. The roughly 45 participants engaged in lively discussions and exchange of ideas.
Thanks to a generous seed grant by the Research Foundation, this event was free of charge for Stony Brook faculty, staff and students. The presentation slides will be made available on the website at https://you.stonybrook.edu/hpcai.
Prof. Bill Tang talking about the use of AI-enabled digital twins in fusion energy research.
The panel at the end of day 1.
Photo credits: Mitzi Kesterson
