Key dates
- Submission deadline
- 23 November 2007
- Author Notification
- 21 December 2007
- Camera-Ready deadline
- 7 January 2008
- Author registration deadline
- 21 January 2008
- Early Registration deadline
- 15 February 2008
Invited Speakers
- Keynote speakers for ARC 2008:
- Satnam Singh, Microsoft Research
- Title: Synthesizing FPGA Circuits from Parallel Programs
- Satnam Singh (MSR Cambridge) and David Greaves (Cambridge University Computer Lab)
- Abstract: In this presentation we describe recent experiments to represent circuit descriptions as explicit parallel programs written in regular programming languages rather than hardware description languages. Although there has been much work on compiling sequential C-like programs to hardware by automatically "discovering" parallelism we work by exploiting the parallel architecture communicated by the designer through the choice of parallel and concurrent programming language constructs. Specially, we describe a system that takes .NET assembly language with suitable custom attributes as input and produces Verilog output which is mapped to FPGAs. We can then choose to apply analysis and verification techniques to either the high level representation in C# or other .NET languages or to the generated RTL netlists.
- Keith Underwood, Intel Corporation
- Title: From Silicon to Science: The Long Road to Production Reconfigurable Supercomputing
- Abstract: Over the last several years, multiple vendors have introduced systems that integrate FPGAs, as well as other types of accelerators, into machines intended for general purpose supercomputing. However, these machines have not broadly penetrated production scientific computing at any of the world's top supercomputing centers. With the excitement around accelerators and the numerous examples of their potential, why haven't they achieved widespread adoption in production supercomputing? This talk will discuss several barriers to adoption based on input from people who buy supercomputers and from people who use them. The short answer is that FPGA enhanced supercomputers look very little like traditional supercomputers and the performance advantage for scientific applications is often not as compelling as advertised. This talk will attempt to map barriers to adoption to specific research challenges that must be addressed to see widespread usage of FPGAs for scientific computing. These challenges include everything from the lowest level of circuit design to the programming of applications, and point to a lot of work between the current state of the art and widespread adoption of reconfigurable computing.
- Reiner Hartenstein, TU Kaiserslautern
- Title: The von Neumann Syndrome and the CS Education Dilemma
- Abstract: Computing the von Neumann style is tremendously inefficient because multiple layers of massive overhead phenomena often lead to code sizes of astronomic dimensions, thus requiring large capacity slow off-chip memory. The dominance of von-Neumann-based computing will become unaffordable during next decade because of growing very high energy consumption and increasing cost of energy. For most application domains a von-Neumann-based parallelization does not scale well, resulting in the escalating many-core programming crisis by requiring complete remapping and re-implementation - often promising only disappointing results. A sufficiently large population of manycore-qualified programmers is far from being available. Efficient solutions for the many-core crisis are hardly possible by fully instruction-stream-based approaches. Several HPC celebrities call for a radical re-design of the entire computing discipline. The solution is a dual paradigm approach, which includes fundamental concepts known already for a long time from Reconfigurable Computing. Whistle blowing is overdue, since these essential qualifications for our many-core future and for low energy computing are obstinately ignored by CE, CS and IT curriculum task forces. This talk also sketches a road map.
The workshop will be held at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering , Imperial College London.
This year Imperial College celebrates its 100 year anniversary
London
London is a multi-cultural city with a plethora of museums, monuments, bars and restaurants.