News
Deadline extended to May 12, 2017.
Background
Recent issues with the power consumption of conventional HPC hardware
results in both new interest in accelerator hardware and in usage of
mass-market hardware originally not designed for HPC. The most prominent
examples are GPUs, but FPGAs, DSPs and embedded designs are also possible
candidates to provide higher power efficiency, as they are used in
energy-restriced environments, such as smartphones or tablets. The
so-called "dark silicon" forecast, i.e. not all transistors may be
active at the same time, may lead to even more specialized hardware in
future mass-market products. Exploiting this hardware for HPC can be a
worthwhile challenge.
As the word "UnConventional" in the title suggests, the workshop focuses
on usage of hardware or platforms for HPC, which are not (yet) conventially
used today, and may not be designed for HPC
in the first place. Reasons for its use can be raw computing power, good
performance per watt, or low cost in general. To address this
unconventional hardware, often, new programming approaches and
paradigms are required to make best use of it. Another focus of
the workshop is on innovative, (yet) unconventional new programming
models, and algorithms (e.g. Big Data) exploiting unconventional HPC
hardware or software.
To this end, UCHPC tries to capture solutions for HPC which are
unconventional today but could become conventional and significant tomorrow,
and thus provide a glimpse into the future of HPC.
Topics
The goal of this workshop is to present research exploring currently
unconventional techniques for HPC and their benefits.
UCHPC also covers according programming models, compiler
techniques, and tools. Thus, suggested topics for papers include,
but are not limited to the following:
- Innovative use of hardware and software unconventional for HPC
- HPC applications in connection with HPC on GPUs (GPGPU), low power/embedded processors, FPGAs, Intel's Xeon Phi architecture, Tilera's tile-based many-core processors, AMDs HSA/hUMA concept, Processing in Memory (PIM), accelerators, etc.
- Cluster/Grid solutions using unconventional hardware, e.g. clusters of game consoles, nodes using GPUs, Low Power/Embedded Processors, MPSoCs, new many-cores from Intel and/or ARM designs, Mac Minis/AppleTVs, FPGAs etc.
- Heterogeneous computing on hybrid platforms
- Performance and scalability studies in HPC using unconventional hardware
- Reconfigurable Computing for HPC
- Performance modeling, analysis and tools for HPC with unconventional hardware
- (Yet) Unconventional programming models for HPC, including PGAS, task-based or data-flow concepts (and supporting tools)
- Big data and/or deep learning using unconventional HPC hardware or software
Paper Submission, Registration, and Publication
Submissions in PDF format should be between
10 – 12 pages in the
Springer LNCS style, which can be downloaded from the
Springer
Web site. The
12 pages limit is a hard limit. It includes
everything (text, figures, references). On acceptance, at least one
author is required to register for workshop attendance at Euro-Par
2017 and present the paper in the workshop.
Login in to the
Euro-Par 2017 Workshop submission server (author role), select the track
"UCHPC - UnConventional High Performance Computing", and submit
your paper in PDF format. It must not be simultaneously submitted to the main
conference or any other publication outlet.
For the workshop, we will prepare hand-outs with the revised papers.
These will be published after the conference in the workshop proceedings of
Euro-Par 2017, part of the LNCS series of Springer.
Best Paper Award
This year, our Best Paper Award goes to "Accelerating the 3-D FFT
using a heterogeneous FPGA architecture" by
Matthew Anderson, Maciej
Brodowicz, Martin Swany and Thomas Sterling. Congratulations!
As in recent years, we had a price together with a trophae for the
best paper award. This year, this was a PYNQ board with a Zynx XC7Z020
SoC, sponsored by Xilinx. We were happy to hand out this price to
Matthew Anderson, the presenter of the paper (on the right in the
picture).