Hey Ceph friends, I hope all is well. This year, the Ceph Foundation plans to submit a Birds of a Feather (BoF) proposal for SuperComputing 2026 (SC26), and we want this to be a genuinely community-driven session, shaped by the people who are deploying, developing, and using Ceph in HPC environments. A BoF is an open, interactive session at SC where practitioners and developers gather to share experiences, discuss challenges, and influence future direction. It's less of a talk and more of a structured community conversation. We'd love your input on two things: 1. TOPIC IDEAS: What should we discuss? We're looking for the most pressing topics, questions, and challenges facing Ceph in HPC right now. Some starting points: - CephFS performance and tuning for HPC workloads - NVMe/SSD tiering and all-flash deployments - Data encryption and security at scale - Interoperability with HPC job schedulers and parallel filesystems - Operational challenges at petabyte scale - What's missing in Ceph for HPC use cases? What would YOU want to talk about? Reply to this thread or fill out this short form: https://forms.gle/SEhgjYz9pda8SgT88 2. PARTICIPATION: Are you attending SC26? We're looking for: - Lightning talk speakers (5–10 min) who can share a real deployment story or lesson learned - Co-session leaders from different organizations (especially HPC centers, national labs, or universities) - Community members who want to show up and join the discussion SC26 takes place November 15–20, 2026, in Chicago, IL. The BoF proposal deadline is July 2nd. This session works best when it reflects a wide range of voices and organizations within the Ceph community, so the more input we receive, the stronger the proposal and the session will be. Please reply here, reach out directly, or share this with anyone in your network who works with Ceph in HPC contexts. Best, ------- Anthony Middleton Community Manager, Ceph Foundation amiddleton@linuxfoundation.org LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/company/ceph>| BlueSky <https://bsky.app/profile/ceph.io> | Twitter <https://x.com/Ceph>