CLASSIC envisions a future where the world’s most complex data challenges are solved through rigorous science, advanced computing, and human insight, helping society understand, secure, and act on critical information responsibly.
To that end, CLASSIC has held an annual invitation-only conference each fall since 2012 in Annapolis, Maryland, convening experts from the government, national laboratories, academia and private industry to discuss challenges and implications of the emergent field of large-scale data analytics.
CLASSIC drives critical conversations amongst decision makers in high-performance computing and analytics. Topics cover a wide range of subjects, from applications to algorithms to hardware to security and policy — take a look at previous agendas here.
CLASSIC is attended by decision-makers and technical leaders in high-performance computing and analytics: federal program managers, national lab researchers, academic researchers, and industry technologists working on hardware, algorithms, security, and policy across data problems at all scales, up to and including extreme scale.
Attendance at CLASSIC is by invitation only; the number of attendees is intentionally limited to around 150 people to foster the kind of informal discussion and interaction that can lead to greater collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the field. Each year invites are issued to roughly 50 from industry, 50 from academia, and 50 from the national labs (ratios are carefully tracked as we issue invites).
Within the industry segment, attendees are primarily VP/CTO-level — the Chief Scientist of NVIDIA has spoken on multiple occasions — as well as senior technologists (DE, Fellow-level thought leaders). On the lab side, we invite a mix of lab fellows and senior staff, including program managers in the Senior Executive Service (flag rank) or equivalent. Academia is a bit more mixed, as we invite a select number of students whom we support as part of a poster presentation.
Here are a few prominent examples of the senior-level attendees from CLASSIC 2025:
Sponsors get direct access to a small, curated room of the people actually setting direction in large-scale analytics and HPC, not the typical trade-show crowd. The size and format are built for real relationship-building, not booth traffic. CLASSIC offers three levels of sponsorship: