🪪 About

Sam Foreman

I am a computational scientist in the AI / ML Group at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at Argonne National Laboratory.

My work centers on large-scale distributed training of foundation models for scientific applications, with an emphasis on efficient training systems, scaling strategies, and AI + HPC workflows.

Research Focus

• Large language model training on supercomputers (Aurora, Frontier, LUMI, Leonardo, and others)
• Foundation models for weather and climate forecasting
• Genome-scale language models for biology
• Distributed training at extreme scale
• ML-enhanced sampling algorithms for lattice QCD

Professional Experience

Assistant Computational Scientist

Argonne National Laboratory, ALCF — Lemont, IL (2022–Present)

• Co-lead the Models and Pre-Training team for AuroraGPT.
• Lead and contribute to large-scale AI training efforts for scientific workloads.
• Work with interdisciplinary teams to improve model quality, throughput, and scalability.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Argonne National Laboratory, ALCF — Lemont, IL (2019–2022)

• Applied deep learning methods to lattice gauge theory and quantum field simulations.
• Developed ML-enhanced Monte Carlo methods for QCD in l2hmc-qcd.
• Collaborated across national lab and university research groups.

Graduate Researcher (DOE SCGSR Fellowship)

Argonne National Laboratory, Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) — Lemont, IL (2018–2019)

• Built and scaled l2hmc-qcd in collaboration with ALCF for doctoral research.

Education

• Ph.D., Physics — University of Iowa (2015–2019)
  • Learning Better Physics: A Machine Learning Approach to Lattice Gauge Theory
• B.S., Engineering Physics — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2010–2015)
  • Energy Storage in Quantum Resonators (US Patent #US9741492B2)
• B.S., Applied Mathematics — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2010–2015)

Awards, Service, and Community

• Member, DeepSpeed Technical Steering Committee (2025–Present)
• Nominated to serve on the APS Coordinating Panel for Software and Computing
• Finalist, ACM Gordon Bell Prize in Climate Modeling (2025) for AERIS
• Finalist, ACM Gordon Bell Prize (2024) for MProt-DPO
• ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research (2022) for GenSLM
• DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Fellow (2018)

Organizing

• SC25 Workshop: High Performance Python for Science at Scale (HPPSS)
• SC25 Tutorial: Accelerating and Scaling Python for HPC
• SC24 Workshop: High Performance Python for Science at Scale (HPPSS)
• SC23 Workshop: High Performance Python for Science at Scale (HPPSS)
• Machine Learning and Quantum Computing for Earth Sciences (USNCCM 2023)

Contact

• Website: samforeman.me
• Email: sf@omg.lol
• GitHub: @saforem2
• Google Scholar: Profile