Workshop on Large-Scale Parallel Processing to be held at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium

Shanghai, China May 21th - 25th, 2012

Please join us on May 25^th in Shanghai for what promises to be a very interesting day. The preliminary workshop schedule is now available and offers a full day of technical talks including analysis of algorithms, specialized systems and performance.

We are also pleased to announce that this year LSPP will have two keynote speakers. The first will be given by Prof. Xian-He Sun from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the second by Prof. Xiao-lin Cao.

Keynote Presentation at 8:30am

Pursuing Large-Scale Systems from the Data-Centric Point-of-View

Prof. Xian-He Sun

Chair of Computer Science and Director of Scalable Computing Software Laboratory, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)

Technology advances are unbalanced. CPU performance has been improving at a much faster pace than memory technologies during the last three decades, which has led to the so-called memory-wall problem. In the meantime, newly emerged IT applications, such as computer animation, social networks, and sensor networks, are all data intensive, which has led to the so-called big-data problem. The lasting memory-wall problem compounded with the newly emerged big-data problem has changed the landscape of computing. CPU speed is no longer the performance bottleneck of a computing system, the data access speed is. However, historically computing systems are designed and developed to utilize CPU performance, not data accessing. A paradigm change is needed to support data-centric computing. In this talk we first review the history and concepts of the big-data and memory-wall problems. We then discuss the challenges of design advanced memory systems for large-scale computing. Finally, we present some our recent results in understanding and optimizing the performance of memory systems from the data-centric point-of-view.

Keynote Presentation at 9:15am

Multi-physics peta-scale simulations using JASMIN infrastucture

Prof. Xiao-lin Cao

Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics

The complexity of application systems and that of computer architectures are providing a great challenge for parallel programming in the field of scientific computing.The main objective of JASMIN is to simplify the development of parallel softwares for large scale simulations of complex applications on parallel computers. Patch-based data structures, efficient communication algorithms, robust load balancing strategies, scalable algorithms are designed and integrated in JASMIN. Tens of codes have been developed using JASMIN and have scaled up to tens of thousands of processors. The main components of JASMIN and its applications are introduced in this talk.

The workshop on Large-Scale Parallel Processing is a forum that focuses on computer systems that utilize thousands of processors and beyond. Large-scale systems, referred to by some as extreme-scale and Ultra-scale, have many important research aspects that need detailed examination in order for their effective design, deployment, and utilization to take place. These include handling the substantial increase in multi-core on a chip, the ensuing interconnection hierarchy, communication, and synchronization mechanisms. Increasingly this is becoming an issue of co-design involving performance, power and reliability aspects. The workshop aims to bring together researchers from different communities working on challenging problems in this area for a dynamic exchange of ideas. Work at early stages of development as well as work that has been demonstrated in practice is equally welcome.

Of particular interest are papers that identify and analyze novel ideas rather than providing incremental advances in the following areas:

Large-scale systems: exploiting parallelism at large-scale, the coordination of large numbers of processing elements, synchronization and communication at large-scale, programming models and productivity

Multi-core: utilization of increased parallelism on a single chip, the possible integration of these into large-scale systems, and dealing with the resulting hierarchical connectivity.

Warehouse Computing: dealing with the issues in advanced datacenters that are increasingly moving from co-locating many servers to having a large number of servers working cohesively, impact of both software and hardware designs and optimizations to achieve best cost-performance efficiency.

Novel architectures and experimental systems : the design of novel systems, the use emerging technologies such as Non-Volatile Memory, Silicon Photonics, application-specific accelerators and future trends.

Applications: novel algorithmic and application methods, experiences in the design and use of applications that scale to large-scales, overcoming of limitations, performance analysis and insights gained.

Results of both theoretical and practical significance will be considered, as well as work that has demonstrated impact at small-scale that will also affect large-scale systems. Work may involve algorithms, languages, various types of models, or hardware. A list of papers presented at previous LSPP workshops can be found here.

Selected work presented at the workshop will be published in a special issue of Parallel Processing Letters in late 2012. Special issues of Parallel Processing Letters from LSPP workshops previously appeared in 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

Submission Guidelines

Papers should not exceed eight single-space pages (including figures, tables and references) using a 12-point on 8½x11-inch pages. Submissions in PostScript or PDF should be made using EDAS. Informal enquiries can be made to Lixin Zhang. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance, presentation quality and appropriateness. Submitted papers should not have appeared in or under consideration for another venue.

Important Dates

Workshop Organization