ESDE at ISC High Performance 2026
Highlights from ISC High Performance 2026, including scenes from the conference exhibition and the JUPITER booth.
Copyright: Konstantin Rushchanskii
Konstantin Rushchanskii and Enxhi Kreshpa of the Earth System Data Exploration (ESDE) Group attended ISC High Performance 2026, held from 21–25 June in Hamburg, Germany. As one of the world's leading conferences on high-performance computing (HPC), ISC brings together researchers, technology developers, and industry partners to explore the latest advances in supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and data-intensive science.
Enxhi attended the conference to experience the broad scientific programme and connect with the international HPC community. Konstantin was part of the JUPITER exhibition booth, where he presented Blablador and also demonstrated the WeatherAI Lab.
ISC High Performance was huge and exciting in scope. The conference covered a diverse range of topics, all connected to supercomputing or applications that run on supercomputers, making it a broadening and mind-opening experience. It also offered a deeper understanding of the hardware capabilities behind the systems we use for everyday training and inference. One of my highlights was connecting with other HPC practitioners with scientific and engineering backgrounds.
Blablador is a service developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich that provides researchers with free, privacy-preserving access to large language models (LLMs) through an authenticated web interface or a REST API compatible with the OpenAI Python API. The service primarily hosts state-of-the-art open-weight models, while also making selected in-house developed models available to users.
Alongside Blablador, Konstantin demonstrated the WeatherAI Lab, an interactive, machine-learning-based weather forecasting demonstrator developed by the ESDE group using NVIDIA software. It allows users to explore how changes in atmospheric conditions, such as mean sea level pressure, temperature, or humidity, influence weather forecasts over the following days. Visitors also gained a preview of future plans to integrate WeatherAI Lab with JARVIS, an upcoming inference cloud platform that will power the JUPITER AI Factory (JAIF). This integration highlights how AI-powered weather applications could be deployed on next-generation HPC infrastructure.
Beyond showcasing these technologies, ISC High Performance 2026 provided an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with the international HPC community, discover emerging developments in AI and supercomputing, and strengthen connections across scientific and engineering disciplines. The conference highlighted the growing role of AI in HPC and offered valuable insights into the technologies that will shape the next generation of Earth system science.