SC26 Birds of a Feather

Continuum Computing: Agentic AI for Intelligent Orchestration

Continuum Computing (digital continuum) is a distributed ecosystem spanning edge devices, scientific instruments, cloud platforms, data centers, supercomputers, and quantum systems. As these infrastructures become increasingly complex, Agentic AI offers new opportunities for intelligent orchestration of computation, data, workflows, and heterogeneous resources. This BOF will explore how collaborative AI agents can enable autonomous scientific computing while ensuring trust, resilience, and human oversight. Topics include multi-agent coordination, AI-driven resource management, autonomous workflows, foundation models for scientific computing, and new programming models. The session will identify key research challenges and foster cross-disciplinary collaboration to advance the next generation of intelligent continuum computing.

SC26 attendees are encouraged to submit questions and comments for the panelists using this link.

Session Leader

Neena Imam
Peter O'Donnell Jr. Director
O'Donnell Data Science and Research Computing Institute
Southern Methodist University

Additional Session Leaders

Nagi Rao
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
Rao joined ORNL in 1993. He is currently a Corporate Fellow. He received B. Tech (1982) from National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India, M.E. (1984) from School of Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, and Ph.D. (1988) in computer science from Louisiana State University. His research areas include high performance and quantum networking, information fusion, machine learning, and federations of science instruments. He is PI of DOE PiQSci: Performance Integrated Quantum Scalable Internet project. He is a Fellow of IEEE and received 2005 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award and 2014 R&D 100 Award.

Ravi  Kapoor
Department of Energy (DOE)
Ravi Kapoor, Ph.D., is a program manager for Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, where he leads initiatives in robotics, laboratory automation, and AI-enabled autonomous experimentation. He previously served as DOE program manager for Titan, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s leadership-class hybrid CPU/GPU supercomputer. An electrical engineer by training, Dr. Kapoor has authored publications applying AI/ML to automatic target recognition for U.S. defense applications and brings expertise in computer vision, image and signal processing, sensing, and heterogeneous computing. His work connects advanced computing, intelligent instruments, and trustworthy, human-guided autonomy to accelerate scientific discovery.

Kyle Chard

Kyle Chard is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He also holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 2011. He co-leads the Globus Labs research group, which focuses on a broad range of research problems in data-intensive computing and research data management.