The Conference on Large-scale Analytics, Science, Systems, and Intelligent Computing (CLASSIC, formerly CLSAC), envisions a future where large-scale analytics and other extreme-scale problems are grounded in rigorous science, advanced mathematics and computing, and human insight to enable society to understand, secure, and responsibly act on the world’s most complex data-driven challenges.
Since 2012, we’ve convened this community each fall in Annapolis to work through the science, math, computing, and human judgment needed to understand, secure, and act responsibly on the world’s most complex data challenges.
Technology luminary George Cotter, who lent his name to our annual award ten years ago, frequently described our conference as bringing communities together who don’t often talk to each other. This includes analysts and computer scientists, hardware and software people, and invitations to those from outside our traditional communities who have something to contribute.
The CLASSIC conference grew out of a simple conviction: the hardest data problems get solved by diverse communities working together, not by any one of those worlds working alone.
That’s why we named our highest honor, the George Cotter Award for Vision and Leadership, after a man who spent his career doing exactly that, bringing NSA cryptologists, HPC vendors, academic researchers, and government program managers into the same room years before anyone else saw the need.
We’re a theme-driven, invitation-only conference built to create a diverse, cross-disciplinary community rather than a submissions-driven technical program. We’re intentionally not a professional society conference, not vendor/industry-driven, and not limited to labs and government. Our roots and sharpest focus are in extreme-scale data — the problems too large or too complex for off-the-shelf approaches — which sets our conversations apart from more general analytics or AI events.
Working at that edge is also what lets us see around corners; the challenges that show up first at extreme scale tend to define where the rest of the field is headed, which is why this community has a track record of spotting what matters before it goes mainstream. Attendance is capped at around 150 people by design, so that conversations stay informal and substantive enough to spark real collaboration between researchers and practitioners.