The Golden Era of Research: Accelerating Time-to-Science with AI Infrastructure, HPC and Gemini

Recorded live at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, this session featured Ronit Levavi Morad, Senior Director at Google Research; Dave Driggers, CEO at Cirrascale; Chrysoula “Chrysa” Malogianni, Senior Associate Vice President for Digital Innovation and Chief Digital Experience Officer at Old Dominion University; and Jesus Trujillo Gomez, Research and Education Executive Lead at Google Public Sector.The speakers explored how, for researchers, the most critical metric was the speed at which data became discovery. They examined the supercomputing architectures, hardware, platforms, and ecosystems needed to transform massive datasets into breakthroughs across disciplines.This session brought together leaders to discuss how Google’s AI-optimized hardware, including TPUs, advanced High Performance Computing (HPC), and powerful models like Gemini, were coming together to tackle the most demanding research workloads. Panelists highlighted how these technologies were accelerating research and discovery by reducing time-to-science and enabling institutions to process increasingly complex scientific challenges with greater speed and precision.The conversation focused on how this convergence of AI infrastructure, HPC, and advanced models was helping build a new engine for scientific discovery—one marked by unprecedented innovation, increased efficiency, and expanded possibilities for academic and institutional research.