TACCSTER 2026 — TACC Symposium for Texas Researchers

TACCSTER is the Texas Advanced Computing Center's yearly gathering for researchers across Texas who depend on advanced computing, and the 2026 edition runs September 21–22 in person at the Advanced Computing Building on UT Austin's J.J. Pickle Research Campus.

The format mixes invited speakers, contributed platform talks, lightning talks, hands-on tutorials, poster sessions, and tours of the data centre itself. Two named 2026 invited talks put AI squarely in the programme: Jeanne Kowalski-Muegge, Associate Director for Clinical AI for Precision Medicine at Dell Medical School, presents "Supercomputing Precision Medicine: Purpose-Built Infrastructure for Clinical AI," and Tom Yankeelov, who directs UT's Center for Computational Oncology, speaks on patient-specific computational modelling. Sessions also cover TACC's own systems — Vista, its first AI-focused resource and a national asset under the NSF NAIRR pilot, and Horizon, launching in 2026 as the largest academic open-science system in the NSF portfolio.

Be clear about what this is: an HPC and research-computing symposium with a substantial, named AI component — not an AI-only conference. It will be most valuable if you train models, run large-scale inference, or build data-intensive research pipelines. Roughly 150 attendees from 30 Texas institutions came in 2025.

Registration is open now. Abstract submissions for talks and posters close August 7, 2026 at 5:00 pm CT, with notifications by August 26; student travel and participation awards of up to $1,500 are available, and accepted work can receive a DOI through UT Libraries' Texas ScholarWorks.

What is not yet published: TACC has not posted daily start and end times or the full agenda — the times shown here are a placeholder pending the schedule, which should follow the August 26 acceptance notifications. Registration is described as free, but confirm the current terms on the registration page before you plan travel.