HEART 2026 Brings Leading Experts in Accelerators and Reconfigurable Computing to Heidelberg
From June 17–19, 2026, Heidelberg University will host the International Symposium on Highly Efficient Accelerators and Reconfigurable Technologies (HEART 2026). The international conference will bring together researchers, industry leaders, and practitioners to discuss the latest advances in accelerator technologies, reconfigurable hardware, and energy-efficient computing systems.
HEART serves as an international forum for presenting and discussing new research on computing systems utilizing acceleration technologies. The symposium focuses on achieving high efficiency through specialized hardware architectures, custom accelerators, and innovative computing methods. These technologies are becoming increasingly important across a wide range of domains, from high-performance computing and cloud data centers to mobile and IoT applications.
Distinguished Keynote Speakers from Industry and Academia
Tobias Becker (NVIDIA)
Director, LPU Hardware Team, NVIDIA
Keynote: The Need for Highly Efficient Accelerators in the Age of Agentic AI
Artificial intelligence is increasingly evolving towards autonomous AI agents capable of performing complex tasks ranging from software development to business process automation. In his keynote, Tobias Becker will explore the computational foundations of Large Language Models (LLMs) and discuss the specialized accelerator architectures required to efficiently support these demanding workloads. He will also provide an outlook on future applications of agentic AI in robotics, industrial systems, and autonomous vehicles.
Andrew Putnam (Microsoft)
Partner General Manager, Cloud and AI Hardware Engineering, Microsoft
Keynote: From Prototype to Planet-Scale: A Decade of Acceleration at Hyperscale
Drawing on more than a decade of experience deploying accelerators in production cloud environments, Andrew Putnam will share insights from Microsoft’s pioneering FPGA acceleration initiatives and hyperscale infrastructure. His keynote will discuss the challenges of scaling hardware acceleration for real-world cloud systems and explain why the future of hyperscale computing depends on heterogeneous hardware-software co-design.
Tobias Kenter (Paderborn University / PC²)
Scientific Advisor for FPGA Acceleration, Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC²)
Keynote: FPGAs in High-Performance Computing: Challenges and Opportunities
FPGAs are increasingly attracting attention in high-performance computing due to their customizable parallelism, energy efficiency, and emerging technologies such as High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Tobias Kenter will discuss both the opportunities and challenges of FPGA adoption in HPC environments and provide perspectives on future developments in this rapidly evolving field.
A Platform for the Future of Efficient Computing
By bringing together leading researchers and industry experts, HEART 2026 provides a platform for discussing the future of accelerator-driven and energy-efficient computing systems. The symposium encourages collaboration between academia and industry while fostering international exchange on modern computer architectures and emerging technologies.
For more information, please visit: https://heart2026.github.io/