Call For Proposals (CFP)

Join us for the 2027 annual HPSF Conference, where developers and users of some of the most critical software projects in High Performance Computing (HPC) come together to shape the future. Hosted by the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF), this event is dedicated to advancing community-driven, production-ready solutions for performance, portability, and productivity in a rapidly evolving HPC landscape.

With its focus on engineering and community building, the HPSF Conference is a unique opportunity to illuminate the emerging challenges of integrating AI usage and accelerated computing into the development processes for the software products HPC relies on. Together, we’ll explore how open source collaboration and a unified foundation for high performance software can unlock new possibilities for addressing the most challenging science and engineering computing problems.

Please be aware that the Linux Foundation will now utilize Sessionize for CFP submissions. Sessionize is a cloud-based event content management software designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. If you need guidance, please review how to submit your session for an event to see step-by-step instructions and helpful screenshots.

Dates to Remember

Reminder: This is a community conference — so no product and/or vendor sales pitches.

Suggested Topics/Tracks Include:

• Building and Sustaining Community
  • Volunteer contributor recruitment, hiring, and workforce (growing pains) or challenges
  • Community organization: meeting, tools and event strategies
  • Success stories and failures in onboarding new institutional contributors
  • Training and education strategies/tools
• User Adoption Experiences & Expectations
  • Criteria for choosing Open Source Solutions
  • Roadblocks to adoption of Open Source Solution
  • Lessons learned from adopting Open Source solutions (in particular HPSF projects)
  • User support strategies, commercial support strategies
• Contributor Experiences & Enhancing Productivity
  • DevOps for scientific software – tools, practices, and automation strategies
  • Managing testing, permissions, and access for external contributors
  • Recognizing contributors and motivating the developer team
• Emerging Technologies, and the Future of HPC
  • New and updated HPC relevant architecture experience
  • Performance experiences and challenges
  • What new optimization strategies are emerging as important
  • Issues with targeting AI first hardware
• AI Impact on OpenSource Development
  • AI tools incorporated in code development/Agentic development
  • Agentic development impact on contribution management in public repositories
  • Supporting new AI workflows
  • Productivity gains realised through AI
  • AI / HPC coupling
  • AI policies for Open Source projects
• Security and Open Collaboration: Challenges & Opportunities
  • Handling permissions, testing, and code contributions from external collaborators
  • Security and trust challenges in open source scientific software
  • Policies and tooling that enable safe and open collaboration

• Session Presentation – 25 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A/Transition
• Lightning Presentation – 8 minutes + 2 minutes for Q&A/Transition
• Panel Discussion – 55 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A/Transition
• Poster Presentation

• All speakers are required to adhere to our Code of Conduct. We also highly recommend that speakers take our online Inclusive Speaker Orientation Course.
• Speakers are responsible for purchasing their own conference registration; complimentary speaker passes are not provided.
• Panel submissions (any submission with more than 2 speakers) must include the names of all participants in the initial submission to be considered. In addition, The Linux Foundation does not accept submissions with all-male panels in an effort to increase speaker diversity.
• Reviewers must be able to confidently assess a speaker’s subject-matter expertise from the proposal. Submissions that rely heavily on AI generated or templated content often lack the specificity needed to evaluate technical depth and may be harder to advance. Please ensure your proposal clearly reflects your own experience and understanding of the topic you intend to present.
• Avoid sales or marketing pitches and discussing unlicensed or potentially closed-source technologies when preparing your proposal; these talks are almost always rejected due to the fact that they take away from the integrity of our events, and are rarely well-received by conference attendees.
• All accepted speakers are required to submit their slides before the event.

While it is not our intention to provide you with strict instructions on how to prepare your proposal, we hope you will take a moment to review the following guidelines that we have put together to help you prepare the best submission possible. To get started, here are three things that you should consider before submitting your proposal:

1. What are you hoping to get from your presentation?
2. What do you expect the audience to gain from your presentation?
3. How will your presentation help better the ecosystem?

There are plenty of ways to give a presentation about projects and technologies without focusing on company-specific efforts. Remember the things to consider that we mentioned above when writing your proposal and think of ways to make it interesting for attendees while still letting you share your experiences, educate the community about an issue, or generate interest in a project.

How to Give a Great Talk

We want to ensure submitters receive resources to help put together a great submission and, if accepted, give the best presentation possible. To help do this, we recommend viewing seasoned speaker Dawn Foster’s in-depth session titled Overcoming Imposter Syndrome to Become a Conference Speaker!

Have More Questions? First Time Submitting? Don’t Feel Intimidated

Linux Foundation events are an excellent way to get to know the community and share your ideas and the work you are doing, and we strongly encourage first-time speakers to submit talks for our events. If you aren’t sure about your abstract, reach out to us, and we will be more than happy to work with you on your proposal.

The Linux Foundation and its project communities are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for participants at all of our events. We encourage all submitters to review our complete Code of Conduct.

If you have any questions regarding the CFP process, please contact us at [email protected].