Important Dates

• Papers and Abstracts Submission: August 1, 2026
• Paper and Abstract Acceptance Notifications: September 4, 2026
• Camera-ready Submissions: September 25, 2026
• Workshop: November 15-20, 2026

All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (AoE).

Call for Papers

Scientific workflows have underpinned some of the most significant discoveries of the past several decades. Workflow management systems (WMSs) provide abstraction and automation that enable researchers to easily define sophisticated computational processes, and to then execute them efficiently on parallel and distributed computing systems. As workflows have been adopted by multiple scientific communities, they are becoming more complex and require more sophisticated workflow management capabilities. A workflow can now analyze terabyte-scale data sets; execute millions of individual tasks; coordinate heterogeneous resources and tasks from edge to core; process near real-time data streams, files, and data placed in different types of storage systems; and incorporate AI agents for multiple purposes. The computations can be single core workloads, loosely-coupled tasks, or tightly-coupled computations, and can run in heterogeneous distributed computing platforms all within a single workflow.

The Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS) focuses on the many facets of scientific workflow composition, management, sustainability, and application to domain sciences in an increasingly diverse and a rapidly evolving technology landscape. WORKS aims to serve as the central meeting point for all the stakeholders involved in the evolving workflows community, and to showcase the latest developments and emerging approaches in the field.

WORKS26 will be held in conjunction with the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC26) at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois (USA).

Topics for the workshop

WORKS26 welcomes original submissions in a broad range of topics in the scientific workflow lifecycle, including but not limited to:

• Workflow user environments, portals, and advanced AI-augmented front-end workflow tools
• Data-driven workflow processing (including stream processing workflows)
• Interactive, adaptive, and dynamic workflows (including workflow steering)
• Workflow execution in distributed and heterogeneous environments (HPC, clouds, edge, grids, and AI infrastructures)
• AI-driven and agentic workflows
• End-to-end workflows - from instruments to networks to cross-facility enactment
• Serverless workflows and serverless orchestration
• Workflows integrating emerging computing, storage and networking technologies (e.g., quantum, DNA)
• Workflow modeling
• Workflow composition languages and orchestrators
• Workflow scheduling and resource management (including energy efficiency and cost)
• Application of AI/ML to workflow management
• Performance analysis and debugging of workflows
• Workflow provenance
• Workflow fault-tolerance and recovery techniques
• Workflows and autonomous, self-driving labs
• Interdisciplinary workflow applications
• Workflow applications and their requirements
• Reproducible research using workflows
• Exascale computing with workflows
• Big Data analytics workflows

There will be two forms of presentations:

• Paper presentations - Resulting from the submission of Full papers (up to 10 pages) describing a novel research contribution in the topics listed above.
• Panel discussions - Resulting from the submission of Abstracts (up to 4 pages) - We encourage abstract submissions from early career researchers with ground-breaking ideas, and established researchers with vast experience and a vision for the future. The purpose of the contributed panel is to support the discussion of emerging ideas in contrast with previously successful approaches.

Full Papers will undergo a thorough, single blind review process. Each full paper will receive at least three reviews from experts in our Workshop Program Committee. Each full paper will be presented at the workshop, and be included in the SC Workshop Proceedings. Our committee will value efforts towards improving the reproducibility and transparency of the presented research. We encourage full paper submissions to include information about relevant software and data artifacts within the paper. Authors are also encouraged to make available online any products of their paper (e.g., simulators, graphs, experimental results, logs, etc.). However, dedicated Artifact Description (AD)/Artifact Evaluation (AE) appendices are not expected as part of the submission.

Abstracts will undergo a thorough, single blind review process and each will receive at least three reviews from experts in our Workshop Program Committee. Based on the content of the accepted abstracts, the Workshop Chairs will organize a Panel discussion during the workshop centered around the contributed topics. One author from each accepted abstract will participate in the panel discussion. Accepted abstracts will not be included in the SC Workshop Proceedings. Unlike some of the previous editions of WORKS, abstracts will not be compiled into a full paper.

Proceedings Publication

Accepted full papers from the workshop will be published in the SC Workshops Proceedings volume, and made available online through IEEE Xplore.

Paper Submission Guidelines

• Full papers: Submissions are limited to 10 pages.
• Abstracts: Submissions are limited to 4 pages.

Submissions are limited to 10 two-column pages (U.S. letter – 8.5″ x 11″), excluding the bibliography, using the IEEE proceedings template. The IEEE conference proceeding templates for LaTeX and MS Word provided by IEEE eXpress Conference Publishing are available for download in this link. To enhance the accessibility, accuracy, and longevity of references in all submitted manuscripts, authors are strongly encouraged to include Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for all cited works whenever available. Page limits include all figures, tables, references, and appendices.

Both Abstracts and Full Papers must be submitted through the official SC26 submission site

Organization

Silvina Caino-Lores

French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA), France

Anirban Mandal

Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), UNC Chapel Hill, USA

George Papadimitriou (Publicity Chair)

Apple, USA

David Abramson

University of Queensland, Australia

Malcolm Atkinson

University of Edinburgh, UK

Ewa Deelman

University of Southern California, USA

Michela Taufer

University of Tennessee, USA

Contact

For information please direct your inquiries to the workshop chairs:

• Silvina Caino-Lores, silvina.caino-lores@inria.fr
• Anirban Mandal, anirban@renci.org