Special Issue on Data-Intensive HPC Techniques for Accelerating Astronomy and Cosmology Applications
Submission Date: 2026-09-01

This Special Issue (SI) invites contributions addressing the challenges of High-Performance Computing (HPC) in the era of data-intensive science, with a special focus on astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. The SI is also associated with the second edition of the workshop Scientific HPC in the pre-Exascale era (SHPC2) (https://www.itadata.it/2025/workshops - Scientific HPC in the pre-Exascale era (2nd edition)), part of ITADATA 2025 conference (https://www.itadata.it).

Guest editors:

Dr. Valentina Cesare,
INAF – Radioastronomical Station of Medicina – Institute for Radioastronomy – Bologna (INAF-IRA) (until 14/05/2025: INAF – Astrophysical Observatory of Catania (INAF-OACT)).

Fields of interest:i. HPC for astronomical missions (involvement in Gaia space mission and Croce del Nord radiotelescope).
ii. GPU programming
iii. Performance portability
iv. Linear systems solving
v. Least-squares and MCMC methods
vi. Dynamics of galaxies
vii. PDE solving
viii. Modified gravity theories

Dr. Alberto Vecchiato,
INAF – Astrophysical Observatory of Turin (INAF-OATO).

Fields of interest:
i. High performance computing for scientific missions (involvement in Gaia space mission)
ii. High-resolution astrometry
iii. Gravitation
iv. Gravity theories

Dr. Ugo Varetto,
Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, Perth, Western Australia

Fields of interest:
i. HPC in scientific software
ii. Data-intensive HPC
iii. Large scale parallel I/O
iv. Accelerators
v. Hybrid CPU/GPU systems
vi. Large scale real-time data processing
vii. Visualisation workflows
viii. Involvement in Square Kilometre Array (SKA) experiment

Special issue information:

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Real-World scientific applications toward (pre-)Exascale computing• HPC and Big Data
• Real-time data pipelines and analysis frameworks
• GPU programming and performance portability
• Scientific code scalability
• Parallel I/O strategies and large-scale storage solutions
• Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning integration in scientific HPC workflows
• Quantum Computing and quantum Machine Learning strategies in scientific applications
• Fault tolerance and workflow orchestration
• Resilience in (pre-)Exascale infrastructures
• Green computing for scientific applications

Submission categories:

This SI will collect:

    Open submissions, covering the topics of interest listed above.
    Submissions from authors of some selected papers from workshop SHPC2, who will be invited to submit an extended version of their conference papers, expected to contain a substantial scientific new contribution compared to the version presented at the workshop. The extended versions will undergo the standard, rigorous journal review process and be accepted only if well-suited to the topics of this SI and meeting the scientific level of the journal.

Manuscript submission information:

General information for submitting papers to PARCO can be found at Guide for authors - Parallel Computing

Submissions should be made online at Submission site for Parallel Computing. Please select the “VSI:Data-Intensive HPC Techniques” option as article type of the paper.

Every paper will be reviewed by three independent experts ensuring a fair and impartial reviewing process.

Important Dates:

Submission Opening Date: 1st March 2026
Submission Deadline: 1st September 2026