The workshop on Unconventional Cluster Architectures
and Applications aims at creating the right atmosphere for a discussion
of opportunities in cluster computing. In this regard, contributions
would not only be accepted according to their technical merits but also
according to their contribution to this discussion.
The main motivation for the
unconventional topic of the workshop is that in the near past we have
seen that many unconventional and disruptive techniques and approaches,
used in specialized cluster computing, have later become pervasive.
Probably, the most prominent example today is certainly GPU Computing.
GPUs, initially used only in the video gaming market, have been later
widely used for accelerating computations due to their extraordinary
parallelism. However, the use of GPUs for acceleration purposes was very
uncommon at the beginning, although it is almost standard today. Thus,
if the UCAA workshop would have taken place during the early stages of
GPGPU, contributions on the use of GPUs for accelerating code execution
would have perfectly fit the workshop topic.
Other examples of such unconventional use of existing resources may
include papers that argue that the current trend at the software level
is clearly virtualization (for consolidation of hardware) that spawns
across different nodes of a cluster. At the hardware level, other
contributions could argue that the trend is disaggregation of resources
like memory, I/O devices, and even cores, so that they can be recomposed
in many different ways. This would further increase later consolidation
opportunities. Other authors could propose that global address spaces
are a mechanism to disaggregate memory and recombine it later across
nodes, proposing the hardware and software infrastructure to do so.
Notice that these proposals may rather be reflective of a broader industry trend.
As can be
seen, work on disruptive approaches is encouraged. The broad scope of
the workshop facilitates submissions on unconventional uses of hardware
or software, trying to gather new ideas in the context of clusters.
Journal Special Issue
Selected
papers presented at the UCAA workshop will be invited to a special issue
on the Springer Cluster Computing Journal, indexed in the JCR rank.
Important Dates
Paper Submission: May 1st, 2012
Paper Notification: June 7th, 2012
Camera Ready: June 27th, 2012
Workshop: September 10th, 2012
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