By Babar Khan, Babar Kahn Research
SC25 has concluded. I just checked the latest post on the LinkedIn page of SC Conference Series that SC25 welcomed 16,499 attendees and featured 559 exhibitors making it the second-largest SC conference by attendance and the largest ever in exhibition participation. That is impressive. Now that I am back home, sitting at my desk with a cup of coffee, the temperature nearing zero and Christmas not far away, this feels like the perfect moment to reflect on the experience and put my thoughts into my first ever blog for STEM-Trek. Yay!
I would start by writing THANKS to our very own Elizabeth Leake and STEM-Trek for providing me this opportunity to attend SC2025 in St. Louis, USA. I truly mean it, because I know it is not an easy task to invite scholars from around the world while also ensuring that everyone remains safe, engaged, and feels heard in an inclusive environment. Elizabeth and Bryan made all of us feel truly welcome. I would also like to thank the other scholars I met through STEM-Trek, particularly the scholars from pan-Africa.
I arrived in St. Louis on 13 November 2025, and my SC2025 activities took place from Friday, 14 November, to Thursday, 20 November. In the following sections of this blog, I will describe my activities for each day.
While this blog will cover my main activities during the seven days of SC2025, it will also address the following three questions:
- What impressed me the most? (no brainer)
- What can I immediately apply at home, and what do I plan to advocate for as a result of something I learned?
- And did I make new relationships or form new collaborations?
14-Nov-2025 (Friday) – 15-Nov-2025 (Saturday):
On 14-Nov-2025 we had our Jetlag Day. And on 15-Nov-2025 we participated in the TANGO/CoNGA@SC25 workshop. Both days stood out to me above everything else at SC25. This is by no means an exaggeration, and as I am a trained scientist, I will back that up with good reasons. 🙂
Why Jetlag Day was impressive
The location of Jetlag Day couldn’t have been better: the POST BUILDING at 900 N Tucker. Since I started my professional career as a broadcast engineer (TV engineer) in Lahore, Pakistan, I always enjoy visiting historical places connected to the press, newspapers, and journalism. It is always a pleasant déjà vu for me. Not only that, I also enjoyed the Jetlag Day talks and learned about T-Rex and the GeoFutures Coalition. I must say a big thanks to all the speakers to make it very interactive (already connected with them on LinkedIn). The audience raised many questions after each talk – all were well engaged with the content.
Why TANGO/CoNGA@SC25 was impressive
TANGO/CoNGA@SC25, an invitation only workshop, was on the second day. It was a celebration of nontraditional architectures and next-generation computational orchestration (hence the name), and it truly lived up to its name. What more could one ask for than having distinguished scientists, like John Leroy Gustafson, kick-start the workshop, followed by a full day of engaging talks from every speaker? Additionally, there were many interesting discussions on next-generation mathematics, hardware, compilers, and related topics. I hope and wish that STEM-Trek, in collaboration with Texas A&M University and the Conference on Next-Generation Arithmetic (CoNGA), continues to host such workshops ahead of the Supercomputing Conference (SC).
And yes, not to forget, we received some really cool SWAG bags, including a truly classy jacket. I even told Elizabeth that the red design on jacket is simply too classy; I can wear it over my Ferrari polos! And round of applause goes to our two TANGO performers, Horst Severini and Liwen Shih 🙂
After a successful TANGO/CoNGA@SC25, later in the evening I really wanted to join the group for Axe-throwing, but I already had a commitment with people from Leil Storage who were in the town for SC2025. Thanks to them for taking out time on my request.
16-Nov-2025 (Sunday):
On Sunday, I attended the tutorial “Building Scalable Agentic Systems for Science: Concepts, Architectures, and Hands-On with Academy.” The tutorial was very well executed and exactly what I needed, as I had been curious to know about scalable agentic systems.
Later in the afternoon, I attended the IBM Storage Scale User Group event, which was truly worth attending. The itinerary of talks was very engaging, particularly the presentations from Guardant Health and Sycomp.
Guardant Health is a precision medicine company focused on transforming patient care and fighting cancer through data. Naturally, this involves managing large-scale storage, and it was inspiring to see the meaningful work they are doing. Later, I made sure to tell the main presenter that I really enjoyed his talk and how meaningful and purposeful their work is.
Sycomp is a global IT services and logistics provider with extensive expertise in cloud, data center, endpoint management, and security solutions. Ruben Lee and his team presented some really interesting use-cases during their talk.
17-Nov-2025 (Monday):
On Monday, I attended the “Introduction to Quantum Computing” tutorial and also made sure to join BUG25, the BeeGFS User Group Meeting. The BUG25 itinerary was very engaging, as the engineers behind BeeGFS provided a detailed technical deep dive into the current system and their future goals. During the lunch break, I sneaked into the National Blues Museum for lunch and also to meet some exhibitors. It felt like a warm-up for the full exhibition, which officially opened later that evening. I attended the Exhibits Reception and Exhibit Floor Ribbon Cutting, and stayed in the exhibitor area until 9:00 p.m., visiting booths of companies related to photonics and optics.
18-Nov-2025 (Tuesday):
On Tuesday, I visited booths of companies working in distributed storage, which I had planned in advance. I am grateful to some exhibitors who kindly accepted my requests for 1:1 meetings.
Additionally, I attended a flash session titled “Ultra Ethernet Starts Here: Slingshot’s Role in the Next HPC Era” and a BoF session called “Emerging Challenges for AI/ML Workflows.”
From 1:52 pm – 2:15 pm, I attended talk about paper titled “ATLAHS: An Application-centric Network Simulator Toolchain for AI, HPC, and Distributed Storage”.
19-Nov-2025 (Wednesday):
On Wednesday, 19 November 2025, I visited booths of companies involved in cooling technologies. Beyond learning more about the cooling hardware, I was particularly interested in the software layers, let’s say the types of software that enable energy measurement, monitoring, and optimization in HPC systems and data centers.
From 12:15 p.m. to 1:15 p.m., I attended the BoF session titled “UALink and Ultra Ethernet: Addressing AI Networking Challenges in an Open Ecosystem.” I chose this session because I am currently implementing UltraEthernet in one of my projects.
From 1:52 pm – 2:15 pm I attended a paper presentation titled “ACTINA: Adapting Circuit-Switching Techniques for AI Networking Architectures“. I had already written to the main author of the paper to tell them that I was looking forward to their talk.
Later, from 5:15 p.m. to 6:45 p.m., I attended the “ISO C++ BoF: C++26 Doing Even More for HPC” session because I love C++, and my day job involves developing and debugging a large C++ codebase.
20-Nov-2025 (Thursday):
On Thursday, 20-November, I visited booths of companies related to Quantum Computing. Since Thursday was Quantum Computing Day for me, I also had a long (probably over an hour) and very productive one-on-one brainstorming session with a peer from STEM-Trek, discussing Quantum Computing, AI topics and the potential scope of our collaboration. Then later Thursday evening, I went to the SC technical reception.
I would like to conclude by answering the remaining two questions:
what can I immediately apply at home, and what do I plan to advocate for as a result of something learned?
SC2025 was positively overwhelming and provided a great deal of exposure. Personally, I understand very well how challenging it is to gain such exposure (it is extremely hard because of many reasons). Next month i.e., January 2026, I have volunteered to mentor an undergraduate student and share what I learned; this will be conducted online. Furthermore, in February 2026, I will be visiting Pakistan, where I plan to share my experience as a form of knowledge transfer with some undergraduate students.
Did I make new relationships or form new collaborations?
Oh yes, I met some very talented, like-minded peers, and we have already decided to give it a try, starting slowly with some common-interest topics.
