RMACC 2026: Full Schedule

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12:00pm MDT

Lunch-- Lunch sponsored by Omnibond

Tuesday May 12, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT

Jordan Ballroom

Tuesday May 12, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm MDT
Jordan Ballroom

General

1:00pm MDT

From Deception Detection to AI-Resilient Assessment: Scaling Human-Centered Analytics

Tuesday May 12, 2026 1:00pm - 2:15pm MDT

Jordan Ballroom

This keynote traces a research and commercialization journey that began in large-scale deception detection and automated interviewing systems and culminated in RhetorixLab, an AI-resilient assessment platform designed to restore authenticity and trust in an era of generative AI. Drawing on years of work in video-based feature extraction and behavioral signal processing, the talk highlights how rich multimodal data from voice, language, and facial expression can be captured and analyzed using commodity hardware and cloud-scale infrastructure. The discussion then pivots to higher education, where traditional text-based assessments are rapidly losing diagnostic value, and shows how asynchronous oral assessments reintroduce human judgment, communication skill, and genuine reasoning.

Speakers

Steven Pentland

Tuesday May 12, 2026 1:00pm - 2:15pm MDT
Jordan Ballroom

Keynote

2:30pm MDT

AI Biomolecular structure prediction tools a year later

Tuesday May 12, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm MDT

Simplot B

The AI biomolecular prediction field keeps moving at a fast rate. In this talk, we'll outline what has happened at Utah in this area in the past year, including setting up a more performant server for Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) using mmseqs2, Boltz2 and Colabfold changes, and biomolecular design with Boltzgen.

Speakers

Martin Cuma

Tuesday May 12, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm MDT
Simplot B

Technical Sessions

2:30pm MDT

Beyond Files: Streaming Data Management with Globus

Tuesday May 12, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm MDT

Simplot D

Beyond growing data volumes, researchers are now having to deal with increasing data velocity. For example, instruments are generating data faster than can be consumed by downstream processes and AI/ML-guided research is relying on near real-time feedback for optimizing experiments. Such data streaming applications require different tools for data management and computation than those used for traditional file-based data.

Building on the established and widely used Globus file transfer service, we present newly released capabilities that enable researchers to stream data securely across wide area networks in support of real-time data processing. We will provide an overview of the Globus data streaming service and describe how to incorporate it into your research applications.

Speakers

Vas Vasiliadis

Tuesday May 12, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm MDT
Simplot D

Technical Sessions

2:30pm MDT

Promoting Cloud Native Development and Deployment at NCAR

Tuesday May 12, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm MDT

Simplot A

Modern research environments often face increasing demands for agility and reproducibility, hindered by traditional, monolithic software architectures. This talk explores the transition to cloud-native computing by leveraging containers and Kubernetes to create portable, consistent computational infrastructures that decouple applications from underlying hardware. By adopting these technologies, research teams can ensure their workflows operate identically across diverse environments, from local development machines to production-grade clusters, thereby eliminating the notorious "works on my machine" problem.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research has deployed an internal Kubernetes based platform called CIRRUS and has been working to further modernize application development and deployments by promoting CI, CD, and GitOps practices. By implementing automated testing and declarative infrastructure management, teams can drastically reduce manual errors and accelerate the deployment of new methodologies. Ultimately, embracing these methodologies empowers researchers to focus on scientific discovery rather than logistical bottlenecks.

Speakers

Kevin Hrpcek

Tuesday May 12, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm MDT
Simplot A

Technical Sessions

2:30pm MDT

Warewulf Basics & Cluster Management

Tuesday May 12, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm MDT

Simplot C

Warewulf is an open-source, stateless cluster management framework for provisioning and managing bare-metal HPC nodes. This presentation walks through the full deployment workflow: installing Warewulf, building node images with the native wwctl toolchain and Apptainer sandboxes, synchronizing user and group IDs, and managing per-node customization through overlays. Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of how to deploy and maintain a Warewulf-managed cluster from initial setup through ongoing image updates.

Speakers

Michael Ennis

Joe Leister

Tuesday May 12, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm MDT
Simplot C

Technical Sessions

3:15pm MDT

Student Career Panel

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT

Simplot D

Join us for a student career panel where you will hear from HPC professionals about how they entered the HPC workforce and what they are looking for when hiring new employees. This will be a one-hour session with presentations and time for questions

"HPC is a hidden gem that many students don’t even know exists - until they do." -- Panelist Kelly Byrne, Idaho National Labs

Moderators

Dan Jorgensen

Speakers

Phil Merrell

Katya Trotta Ciovacco

Kelly Byrne

Boyd Wilson

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT
Simplot D

Panel

3:15pm MDT

Accelerating Innovation with Google Cloud’s AI Infrastructure

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT

Simplot A

This presentation provides a technical overview of machine learning infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), focused on hardware and operational efficiency.
We will discuss evaluating hardware accelerators based on specific workload requirements and take a deeper dive into Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), specifically examining their architecture for large-scale matrix operations and the optimization of FLOPS per dollar. We will then look at other key considerations for running ML lab environments in GCP. Topics include:

Infrastructure Selection: An overview of GCP’s ML-optimized compute and storage offerings.
Operational Management: Strategies for capacity planning, cost control, and maximizing goodput.
Frameworks and libraries enabling model training and serving.

Speakers

Mat Morgan

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT
Simplot A

Technical Sessions

3:15pm MDT

Hands-On with DeepLynx Nexus: Building an AI-Ready Data Catalog

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT

Jordan Ballroom Room C

In 2018, Idaho National Laboratory built DeepLynx, a data warehouse designed to organize large amounts of engineering and scientific data. As INL's projects grew more complex and AI became more central to their work, the original platform couldn't scale to meet new requirements.
DeepLynx Nexus was built to address these limitations. Rather than replicating and storing large datasets, Nexus catalogs metadata and relationships about data that lives in existing systems. Think of it as a smart catalog that doesn't just tell you what data exists and where to find it, but also explains how different pieces relate to each other, where they came from, and what they mean. This rich context is exactly what AI agents need to actually do useful work.
This presentation provides a hands-on walkthrough of getting Nexus running locally and cataloging your first datasets. We'll cover installation, configuration, creating a data schema, and a brief overview of Apache Airflow, a common ETL adapter architecture we use to bring metadata into Nexus. By the end, you'll have a practical understanding of how Nexus works and how it's being used to support lab initiatives.

Speakers

Drew Rizk

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT
Jordan Ballroom Room C

Technical Sessions

3:15pm MDT

NSGA-II at scale

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT

Simplot B

Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) remains one of the most widely adopted metaheuristics for solving multi-objective optimization problems; however, its conventional usage is often limited to default parameter settings and moderate-scale problem instances, which restricts its effectiveness in large-scale and high-dimensional scenarios. This tutorial presents a comprehensive and practical guide to scaling NSGA-II for large-scale optimization, emphasizing the critical role of algorithm configuration, parameter tuning, and implementation design. We present empirical evidence demonstrating that appropriately configured NSGA-II variants can effectively address both benchmark and real-world problems involving extremely high-dimensional decision spaces. The tutorial further discusses computational considerations, including parallelization strategies and memory efficiency, providing actionable insights for practitioners aiming to deploy NSGA-II in high-performance computing environments. Overall, this tutorial highlights that careful algorithmic configuration and scalable implementation are key to unlocking the full potential of NSGA-II in large-scale multi-objective optimization.

Speakers

Swetha Varadarajan

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT
Simplot B

Technical Sessions

3:15pm MDT

RMACC User Facilitation Meet-Up

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT

Simplot C

Calling all facilitators and other user support personnel! Let’s meet up in person at RMACC to discuss our successes and challenges. Topics will include experiences in user education and outreach; the use of AI for case management and other support services; meeting the needs of customers with sensitive data, and anything else that comes up!

Speakers

Andy Monaghan

Tuesday May 12, 2026 3:15pm - 4:15pm MDT
Simplot C

Technical Sessions

4:30pm MDT

CANCELLED- Redesigning the Hellgate HPC: Lessons in overcoming growing pains and purgatory on mid-sized clusters.

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

Simplot A

Over the past four years, the University of Montana Hellgate HPC has rapidly grown from a ragtag collection of individual lab systems to the largest computing resource at our institution, comprising roughly 3,000 compute cores, 130 GPUs, and over 200 users. However, this development has exceeded the scale of our original HPC design, with consequences to stability, performance, and user experience. These issues were addressed by revisiting our stateless provisioning strategies, network/hardware topology, authentication flow, head node stack, and administrative standards of practice. We discuss our experiences in employing Ansible and Git to create scalable infrastructure and sustainable SOPs, publishing a living user documentation base, redesigning physical layout, and the obstacles, decisions, and surprises we encountered along the way.

Speakers

Myra Jamison

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Simplot A

Technical Sessions

4:30pm MDT

Navigating the Flash Crisis: Why Architectural Flexibility Wins in 2026

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

Simplot D

Flash pricing volatility has reshaped the storage landscape and organizations are rethinking how to get all-flash performance without runaway costs. In this session we will discuss practical approaches to navigating flash economics, cost optimization, and performance at scale.

NAND flash and DRAM prices are surging and supply is constrained, forcing requotes and delaying deals. VDURA’s mixed fleet with intelligent tiering architecture keeps AI/HPC projects moving with more budget stability. Attendees will learn how to:

Keep AI/HPC projects on budget.
Sustain throughput under concurrency and checkpointing.
Avoid over-investing in flash for capacity-heavy data.

In short, VDURA’s mixed-fleet architecture delivers GPU-class performance with lower cost and greater supply-chain resilience.

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Simplot D

Technical Sessions

4:30pm MDT

NetCDF State of the Union, Roadmap Forwards

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

Simplot B

NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and machine-independent, self-describing file formats used to store and share array-oriented scientific data. Widely used in atmospheric and oceanic sciences, it supports efficient access to multidimensional data (e.g., temperature, wind speed), and has been a fundamental archival and operational data format used since 1990. In this workshop, the netCDF lead developer from NSF Unidata, Ward Fisher, will discuss the current state of the netCDF project, how we have adapted to the move to Cloud Computing and object data storage, and what is on the horizon for this storied project.

Speakers

Ward Fisher

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Simplot B

Technical Sessions

4:30pm MDT

Quantum computing HPC integration

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

Simplot C

Coltran Hophan-Nichols from Montana State University will discuss ongoing work to integrate multiple quantum computing modalities with classical high-performance computing. This work involves SLURM configurations, access controls, network configurations, and user interfaces. Hybrid quantum-classical and quantum simulation use cases will be covered.

Speakers

Coltran Hophan-Nichols

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Simplot C

Technical Sessions

4:30pm MDT

Securing Trust in AI-Driven Research and HPC Environments

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT

Jordan Ballroom Room C

Advanced computing environments are rapidly adopting AI to accelerate, automate analysis, and streamline decision-making. That speed is useful, but it introduces a problem IT teams and research leaders often underestimate: synthetic confidence. As AI-generated outputs begin to look authoritative, organizations risk accepting flawed results, weak explanations, or manipulated content with less scrutiny than they would apply to a human analyst. This session explores how trust is formed, misplaced, and exploited in AI-enabled computing environments, particularly where high-performance computing, sensitive research, and collaborative workflows intersect. Attendees ill walk away with a practical framework for improving verification culture, reducing automation bias, and building security controls that protect not just systems, but judgment itself.

Tuesday May 12, 2026 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Jordan Ballroom Room C

Technical Sessions

12:00pm MDT

1:00pm MDT

2:30pm MDT

2:30pm MDT

2:30pm MDT

2:30pm MDT

3:15pm MDT

3:15pm MDT

3:15pm MDT

3:15pm MDT

3:15pm MDT

4:30pm MDT

4:30pm MDT

4:30pm MDT

4:30pm MDT

4:30pm MDT

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