InPEx 2026: Shaping the Post-Exascale Future Through International Collaboration

The International Post-Exascale Project (InPEx) held its 2026 workshop from 22 to 25 April in Niterói, near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The workshop brought together around 120 experts from the international HPC community, representing research organisations, universities and national computing initiatives from Europe, Japan, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Launched in 2023 as an international initiative, InPEx was initiated by the French PEPR NumPEx to foster international collaboration and co-design around the future of high-performance computing. The initiative brings together major HPC communities and programmes, including NumPEx in France, EuroHPC in Europe, the US Exascale Computing Project ecosystem and Japan’s national supercomputing initiatives.

The 2026 workshop focused on the major technological and scientific challenges emerging as HPC moves towards and beyond the Exascale era.

Five major topics structured the discussions: HPC/AI convergence, GenAI and software engineering, the computing continuum and data management, experimentation with large AI models for science, and international roadmapping. Quantum computing was also addressed as part of the broader convergence between emerging computing paradigms.

The workshop provided a unique opportunity to compare regional strategies and ongoing initiatives. Representatives from Japan, the United States, Europe and Latin America presented their national and regional roadmaps, including developments around AI for Science, quantum computing, AI Factories and future HPC infrastructures.

Dedicated working sessions then brought participants together to address concrete research and technology challenges. Discussions explored topics such as AI and HPC co-design, scalable training and inference, heterogeneous architectures, low-precision computing, AI-driven software engineering, scientific foundation models and the integration of computing resources across the computing continuum.

A central objective of InPEx is to move beyond the exchange of information and build shared visions and concrete international collaborations. The Niterói workshop continued work initiated during previous InPEx meetings and contributed to the development of common roadmaps for the Post-Exascale era.

The international roadmapping discussions addressed the future of heterogeneous computing, energy efficiency and the convergence of AI, HPC and quantum computing. The workshop also explored how international communities could coordinate their efforts to address common technological challenges and support future research and funding strategies.

For NumPEx, InPEx represents a major international extension of its mission to anticipate the software and technological challenges of Exascale and beyond.

By initiating and supporting InPEx, NumPEx is helping to create a global forum where HPC communities can share experience, identify common challenges and co-design the technologies needed for the next generation of scientific computing. The initiative also strengthens links between European, American, Japanese and Latin American HPC ecosystems.

The 2026 workshop in Brazil marked another important step in this process, transforming discussions around Post-Exascale computing into concrete international working groups, roadmaps and collaborative activities.