SC26, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, will be held at McCormick Place in Chicago. The conference runs from the fifteenth to the twentieth of November. The year is 2026.
The SC Conference Series is organised jointly by the IEEE Computer Society technical consortium on high performance computing and the Association for Computing Machinery special interest group on high performance computing. It has run annually for more than three decades and alternates between major American convention cities.
Who attends and why it matters commercially
SC is unusual among technical conferences in carrying a very large commercial exhibition alongside its research programme. Hardware vendors, hyperscale cloud providers, national laboratories, universities, storage and networking suppliers and an expanding cohort of artificial intelligence infrastructure companies all take floor space. For the vendors it is the principal annual shop window for supercomputing and AI infrastructure, and procurement conversations that run for a year are often opened there.
The conference is also where the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is traditionally presented, which gives the week a competitive edge that reaches well beyond the research community and into national technology policy.
The attendee mix spans research leadership and enterprise buyers. Chief technology officers, heads of research computing, data centre operators and infrastructure architects attend alongside the academic programme, which is why the event has become a fixture for executives whose organisations are building out AI and high performance computing capacity rather than only for the scientists who use it.
McCormick Place is the largest convention centre in North America and sits on the lakefront south of downtown Chicago, which allows the conference to run its technical programme, its exhibition and its workshop track in parallel under one roof.
