Northwestern Hosts the Greater Chicago Area Systems Research Workshop

Northwestern hosted the 13th Greater Chicago Area Systems Research Workshop (GCASR 2026) on May 11, bringing together a record-breaking 315 participants from 34 institutions. The annual workshop aims to advance awareness, collaboration, and synergy among systems researchers across academia, national labs, and industry in Chicagoland and the upper Midwest region.

GCASR 2026 was sponsored by Argonne National Laboratory, the Chameleon Project, DePaul University, Hudson River Trading, Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois Chicago.

The workshop featured 13 invited talks, including keynotes by A.M. Turing Award Laureate David Patterson (Google and University of California, Berkeley) and Maurice Herlihy (Brown University), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Academy of Inventors. Additional sessions included invited talks by NAE member and CRA Computing Community Consortium Chair William Gropp (University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign) and Compiler Explorer creator Matt Godbolt (Hudson River Trading).

Researchers represented a variety of computer systems disciplines, including operating systems, distributed and decentralized computing, machine learning systems, high performance computing, computer architecture, networks, databases, quantum computing, and security.

The GCASR 2026 organizing committee was co-led by general chair Peter Dinda and program co-chair Andrew Crotty. Dinda is a professor of computer science and (by courtesy) electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern Engineering. Crotty is an assistant professor of computer science.

In their invited talk, Izzy Grosof, assistant professor of industrial engineering and management sciences and (by courtesy) computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering, discussed task scheduling algorithms designed to allocate massively heterogenous computing resources. Other talks explored topics such as applying autonomous agents to database systems, laboratory automation with humanoid robots, performance engineering, reliability estimation in noisy quantum circuits, and sustainable AI systems.

GCASR 2026 attendees also viewed more than 160 posters highlighting work from authors at 38 institutions. Northwestern students and faculty members contributed more than 35 posters, including collaborations with Argonne National Laboratory, Cornelis Networks, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Grambling State University, Illinois Institute of Technology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Nvidia, Quantum Network Design GmbH, Tuskegee University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Strasbourg.