A Home of Their Own: PEARC26 Debuts a Dedicated Research Software Engineering Special Track

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PEARC Celebrates 10th Anniversary of Conference Series
The upcoming PEARC26 conference scheduled to take place July 26-30 in Minneapolis, Minnesota will be...
When ACM PEARC26 happens July 26-30 at the Minneapolis Convention Center, it will mark two firsts at once. The conference series, which began as PEARC17 in 2017 and has been sponsored by ACM and its SIGHPC and SIGAPP special interest groups since PEARC20, will celebrate its tenth edition with a record-breaking over 1,000 attendees. And for the first time, the program will include a special technical track for research software engineering (RSE): “Research Software Engineering: People, Practice, and Impact.”
The new special track, whose papers are published in the ACM proceedings alongside the conference’s Systems, Applications, and Workforce Development tracks, is co-chaired by Ian Cosden, Sr. Director of Research Software Engineering at Princeton University, and Pengyin Shan, Senior Research Software Engineer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“Research software engineering is one of the fastest-growing areas within research computing organizations and the PEARC community. It uses software engineering best practices and research methods to build tools, workflows, and platforms that enable and accelerate scientific discovery” – Ian Cosden
The US-RSE Association defines research software engineers broadly as “those who regularly use expertise in programming to advance research.” This covers a wide spectrum: researchers who spend much of their time writing code, full-time software engineers building tools for science, and everyone in between. What unites them is the work of turning research methods into robust, reproducible, and sustainable software: the scientific research products that outlive any single paper or grant. The distinction from conventional software engineering is less about the code than the context: requirements come from a scientific question and the success is measured in the research it enabled.
This work spans computational and data science, visualization tools, cybersecurity, metadata management, authentication systems, and science gateways; it occurs in and impacts all scholarly disciplines; and it runs on everything from national supercomputers to laptops and Raspberry Pis. A growing part of it focuses on making HPC accessible to non-experts, so that researchers do not need to learn Fortran or Linux before they can do useful work on a cluster.
“We picked the track theme deliberately: people, because RSE professionals are much the story as the code; practice, because what we share is how the work actually gets done; and impact, because we want to show the science the software made possible.” – Pengyin Shan
The inaugural RSE track received both full and short paper submissions, with accepted work presented across the conference week and final presentation materials shared openly through the PEARC26 community on Zenodo. Topics range across software practices, career paths, team models, and the tools that make research software sustainable. In addition, the track has one invited talk, which comes from Daniel S. Katz, Chief Scientist at NCSA, who will present “Community Activities to Advance Research Software” on Tuesday, July 28.
“Many aspects of research software engineering require community activity; I’ll discuss this and how people are working together to solve some of the field’s challenges” – Daniel S. Katz
The RSE track will anchor the conference’s closing day. On Thursday, July 30, a panel moderated by Pengyin Shan and Patrick Schmitz will bring together speakers from across RSE fields:
The panel will examine where the RSE profession stands and where it is heading, including career pathways, institutional models, and the evolving relationship between research software and an increasingly AI-driven computing landscape. It will share the closing day with the PEARC ten-year anniversary plenary reuniting chairs from across all ten PEARC conferences, a fitting pairing of a look back at the community’s roots and a look forward at one of its fastest-growing professions.
The RSE track arrives at a milestone moment for the conference itself. Registration for PEARC26 has passed 900, positioning the series to cross the 1,000-attendee mark for the first time in its history. Under the theme “Resilient Roots, Empowered Communities,” the technical program, shaped by Technical Program Co-Chairs Gladys Andino (University of Virginia) and Weronika Filinger (EPCC, University of Edinburgh), spans AI and agentic systems, HPC operations, workforce development, quantum computing, and advanced networking.
For research software engineers, though, PEARC26 will be remembered as the first year to dedicate recognition to the research computing professionals who build the software that research runs on.
Late registration for PEARC26 remains open; details are available at pearc.acm.org/pearc26.
About the author: Pengyin Shan is a senior research software engineer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and co-chair of the research software engineer track for PEARC26.

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