Nature-inspired computation—including evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, neural and neuromorphic systems, and quantum-inspired optimization—has long been associated with parallelism and distributed search. As high-performance computing (HPC) platforms evolve toward extreme scale and heterogeneous architectures, these paradigms are increasingly positioned to exploit massive parallelism across CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, neuromorphic hardware, and emerging quantum devices.

While evolutionary algorithms have historically led this integration, similar scalability challenges and opportunities arise in swarm-based methods, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, artificial immune systems, self-organizing systems, and bio-inspired neural approaches. Additionally, hybrid paradigms—such as quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithms, neuromorphic acceleration of population-based search, and agent-based swarm systems operating at metropolitan or planetary scale—introduce new algorithmic and systems-level questions.

Deploying nature-inspired algorithms on modern HPC platforms introduces a secondary objective beyond solution quality: efficient and responsible use of computational resources. Researchers must navigate trade-offs among synchronization models, communication overhead, heterogeneous hardware utilization, memory hierarchies, accelerator-aware design, and energy efficiency. These challenges extend to workflow orchestration, containerization, reproducibility, and benchmarking across diverse computing substrates.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers working at the intersection of nature-inspired computation and large-scale computing systems. We welcome contributions spanning evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, neuromorphic computing, quantum and quantum-inspired optimization, bio-inspired multi-agent systems, and hybrid paradigms. The goal is to foster dialogue on scalable algorithm design, performance modeling, benchmarking, and practical deployment experiences on leadership-class and emerging architectures. By bridging algorithm designers, application scientists, and systems researchers, the workshop seeks to advance principled and efficient large-scale nature-inspired computation.

Target participants
The workshop is intended for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of nature-inspired computation and large-scale computing systems, including:

- Researchers in evolutionary computation developing parallel, distributed, or heterogeneous variants of evolutionary algorithms
- Researchers in swarm intelligence, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, artificial immune systems, and self-organizing systems
- Scientists working in neuromorphic computing, spiking neural networks, and hardware-accelerated bio-inspired systems
- Researchers exploring quantum-inspired algorithms or hybrid classical–quantum optimization strategies
- Practitioners deploying large-scale agent-based models and bio-inspired multi-agent systems on HPC platforms
Systems and software researchers interested in runtime systems, workflow orchestration, performance modeling, and energy-efficient algorithm deployment
- Application scientists using nature-inspired methods for reinforcement learning, neural architecture search, large-scale simulation calibration, or scientific discovery
- Advanced graduate students and early-career researchers seeking to scale nature-inspired methods beyond desktop and cluster environments

Submission Guidelines
- Authors need to submit their papers using https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nichpc26.
- Submitted papers must not exceed 12 pages (excluding references) and are required to be in compliance with the Springer LNCS style guidelines for full papers: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines
- Papers will be evaluated based on technical correctness, significance, novelty, writing, clarity, and ability to reproduce results, if relevant.
- Some accepted workshop papers will be selected for publication in a special journal issue.

Important Dates
Please note that the dates are subject to change.

Submission opening March 13, 2026
Submission deadline May 31, 2026
Notification of paper acceptance June 14, 2026
Workshop August 29th or 30th (TBD)

Workshop Venue
The Nature Inspired Computation in HPC Workshop will be part of the 2026 Parallel Problem Solving from Nature Conference (PPSN 2026) in Trento, Italy. The workshop will be held as a two-hour session event during the conference.

Mailing List and Contact Information
Mailing list for workshop announcements: https://groups.google.com/g/2026-ppsn-nature-inspired-hpc-workshop/about
Contact the committee: 2026-ppsn-nature-inspired-hpc-workshop-organizers@googlegroups.com