From 16 to 21 November 2025, MaX Centre of Excellence was presented at SC25 – the International Supercomputing Conference, held this year in St. Louis, USA. The event brought together more than ten thousand professionals from the global high-performance computing community, continuing a tradition that began in 1988.
MaX partner IT4Innovations attended the conference and showcased the project. Throughout the week, their booth screened the official MaX project video and shared leaflets and promotional materials with visitors from research institutions, supercomputing centres, industry, and government agencies. This presence offered an opportunity to introduce MaX to new audiences and to exchange views with long-standing collaborators.
A flagship event for the HPC community
SC25 confirmed its role as the main international forum for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and data analysis. The programme covered a wide range of topics, including algorithms and scientific applications, new computing architectures and networks, cloud and distributed computing, machine learning and HPC integration, performance and system software, data analytics, visualisation, and large-scale storage. The conference also maintained its long-standing structure: technical sessions, tutorials, panels, exhibitions, and community meet-ups. Sponsored by ACM, SIGHPC, TCHPC, and the IEEE Computer Society, the event once again demonstrated its ability to bring together researchers, software developers, supercomputing centres, policymakers, and technology providers.
For MaX, SC25 was the opportunity to present our work to a wide and technically diverse audience. The discussions held at the booth showed a growing interest in exascale-ready software for materials science, and in the role of European Centres of Excellence in shaping the future of HPC. IT4Innovations, a long-standing member of the MaX consortium, also used the occasion to highlight its broader activities as a national supercomputing centre. As the leading HPC facility in the Czech Republic, it operates state-of-the-art systems and supports research in HPC, AI, quantum computing, and high-performance data analytics, all areas strongly connected to MaX strategic goals.
The 2025 edition of the SC conference showed once again that international collaboration remains essential for progress in high-performance computing. For MaX, being visible at such a global gathering reinforced our mission: to support advanced materials discovery through scalable, open, and high-performance software technologies. As we move toward the next stage of the project, the contacts and exchanges initiated in St. Louis will continue to shape new partnerships, new ideas, and new developments within the MaX ecosystem.
Photo credits: Markéta Dobiašová and the IT4Innovations team at SC25.