Wrapping Up ICPE 2026: A Milestone Event in Performance Engineering

Monday, June 29, 2026 00:00

We are delighted to share highlights from the recently concluded 17th annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) 2026, held May 4-8 in Florence, Italy.

By Roberto Verdecchia, Catia Trubiani, Ana Lucia Verbanescu, Radu Calinescu

ICPE has been the flagship conference in the area of performance engineering over the years and has a tradition of bringing together both academic scholars and industrial practitioners to discuss the recent advances and emerging trends in the area.

Global Perspectives & Inspiring Keynotes

This year’s event, organized at the historic Fondazione CR Firenze’s Innovation Centre, welcomed more than 140 registered participants, who contributed to a rich program spanning keynote speeches, research and industrial presentations, and collaborative workshops. The conference facilitated discussions and networking among attendees from across the globe, including experts from academia, industry, and research institutions.

Our keynote sessions featured talks from three distinguished researchers:

Prof. Leana Golubchik (University of Southern California, USA) explored a wide range of approaches to predicting the performance of machine learning workloads.
Prof. Didem Unat (Koç University, Turkey) presented an overview of GPU-centric communication, highlighting mechanisms and tool support for profiling multi-GPU communication.
Dr. Jeff Hammond (NVIDIA, Finland) provided an industrial perspective on the state-of-the-art of communication software for supercomputers and its applications.

These keynote talks sparked lively discussions and set the tone for the innovative and forward-thinking atmosphere of the conference.

A Rich, Diverse Program

This year’s technical track comprised a record number of contributions: 23 full research papers, 5 short papers, 7 industrial papers, 9 artifact evaluations, 3 data challenges, 10 emerging-research pieces, 7 posters and demos papers and 1 journal-first presentation.

Five co-located workshops and three tutorials explored important topics in performance engineering. Discussions ranged from hot topics in cloud computing, the benchmarking and load testing of software systems, and performance optimization in the LLM world to the application of performance engineering in both educational and practical contexts, systems and service quality, and Linux performance analysis tools. Further sessions addressed performance profiling and bottleneck identification for AI/ML workloads and best practices and lessons learned from implementing GPU workloads for the latest SPEC efficiency benchmarks.

A panel, “Performance Engineering in the Gen-AI Era,” featured four distinguished researchers: Valeria Cardellini, Leana Golubchik, Samuel Kounev, Bjarne Stroustrup, and was moderated by Vittorio Cortellessa.

Awards & Special Moments

A highlight of ICPE 2026 was the presentation of the SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award to Dr. Mohammad Bakhshalipour from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Bakhshalipour’s dissertation on “Bridging Real-Time Robotics and Computer Architecture” integrates robotics and computer architecture by introducing comprehensive, open-source benchmark suites and performance studies for real-time robotic applications, and by proposing efficient application-specific hardware accelerators and domain-specific processors that demonstrate substantial performance improvements through targeted architectural design and empirical evaluation

Additionally, the Best Paper Award was presented to “Variability-Guided Performance Optimization,” authored by Eitan Frachtenberg, Viyom Mittal, Mohammed Baydoun, Aditya Dhakal, Izzat El Hajj, and Dejan Milojicic. The Best Industry Paper Award was presented to “Evaluating Kubernetes Performance for GenAI Inference: From Automatic Speech Recognition to LLM Summarization,” by Sai Sindhur Malleni, Raúl Sevilla, Aleksei Vasilevskii, José Castillo Lema and André Bauer. The 10-year Most Influential Paper Award was presented to “Learning from Source Code History to Identify Performance Failures,” by Juan Pablo Sandoval Alcocer, Alexandre Bergel, and Marco Tulio Valente.

Gratitude and Looking Forward

We would like to express our gratitude to all the attendees, speakers, and sponsors of ICPE 2026. Heartfelt thanks to our general chairs, program chairs, track and workshop organizers, sponsors, and every volunteer who made ICPE 2026 a resounding success.

General Chairs

Roberto Verdecchia, University of Florence, Italy
Catia Trubiani, Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy

Research Program Chairs

Ana Lucia Verbanescu, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Radu Calinescu, University of York, United Kingdom

Industry Track Chair

Tommaso Cucinotta, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy
Mathew ‘Mat’ Colgrave, NVIDIA, Portland, Oregon, US

Artifact Evaluation Chairs

Martina Rapp-Sieger, FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
Willem Meijer, Linköping University & WASP Graduate School, Sweden

Journal-First Chairs

Helena Rodrigues, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
Vasilios Andrikopoulos, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Workshop Chairs

Érica Ferreira de Souza, Universidade Tecnòlogica Federal do Paranà, Brasil
Andres Diaz-Pace, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Awards Chairs

Catalina M.Lladó, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
Philipp Leitner, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Finance Chairs

Laura Carnevali, University of Florence, Italy
Breno Miranda, Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil

Proceedings Chairs

Veronika Lesch, Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg (DHBW) Mosbach, Germany
Diletta Olliaro, KTH Royal Institute of Technology & Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy

Posters and Demos Chairs

Raffaela Groner, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Sandro Speth, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Data Challenge Chairs

Larissa Schmid, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Lizhi Liao, University of Guelph, Canada

Emerging Research Track Chairs

Beatrice M. Ombuki-Berman, Brock University, Ontario, Canada
Pooyan Jamshidi, University of South Carolina, US

Tutorial Chairs

Sören Henning, Dynatrace, Austria
Alireza Hakamian, University of Hamburg, Germany

Publicity Chairs

Gricel Vázquez, University of York, UK
Matthijs Jansen, VU Amsterdam, Netherlands

Registration Chairs

Leonardo Scommegna, University of Florence, Italy
Emilio Incerto, IMT Lucca, Italy

Web Chairs

Leonardo Paroli, University of Florence, Italy
Giovanni Fontani, University of Florence, Italy

Be sure to mark your calendars: ICPE'27 will take place between 24-28 May 2027 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The call for papers will be announced in late 2027, with the local General Chair: Philipp Leitner.

Thank you once again for being a part of ICPE 2026. We hope to see you next year in Gothenburg!