[hpc-announce] Deadline approaching 10/1: HPCDB 2012 position papers, co-located with SC12

[Bill Howe]

2nd Annual Workshop on High-Performance Computing meets Databases (HPCDB)
co-located with Supercomputing 2012, Salt Lake City, UT

http://hpcdb.org

We seek 4-page position papers and/or 1-page lightning talk proposals
that involve database techniques for high-performance computing (HPC)
applications or database system designs for HPC hardware platforms.
Lightning talks will be 5 minutes and should be as provocative as
possible.  Authors of accepted position papers will give a 25 minute
talk.

Full papers: October 1
Notification: October 17
Workshop: November 11

Submission site: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?a=3052822

Description
The high-performance computing (HPC) community is facing significant
data challenges: the performance of simulations on evolving leadership
class computing architectures are increasingly dominated by the costs
of data access, movement, transformation and analysis on the HPC
system. These problems are expected to only get worse as we move
towards exascale computing. The database community has developed a
collection of approaches that have allowed them to effectively meet
similar data challenges for the commercial sector by emphasizing a
rigorous data model, a simple but expressive query algebra, cost-based
optimization, declarative query languages, and logical and physical
data independence.

Similarly, the database community is building new data management
systems for the massive-size datasets that users are increasingly
accumulating. Today, however, most of the work in that community
focuses on commodity, shared-nothing systems with some extensions
toward incorporating new hardware advances (e.g., SSDs or GPUs). The
database community could greatly benefit from interactions with the
HPC community and the development of new database systems capable of
leveraging the power of HPC platforms.

This workshop is focused on bringing together the HPC and database
communities in an effort to facilitate discussions that will lead to
both a greater awareness of each other and eventually solutions to the
myriad of data problems facing high performance computing and data
management. Among others, workshop participants will discuss the
following questions:
*	What are the appropriate data models for HPC data? (arrays,
structured and unstructured meshes, graphs, trees, relations?)
*	Which critical systems and subsystems found in HPC environments
would benefit from features typically associated with databases?
(e.g., filesystems equipped with indexing and query optimization;
monitoring implemented as stream queries)
*	Can declarative query languages make HPC systems and datasets
accessible to a new class of data-oriented scientists?
*	The hallmark of the database community is to “push the computation
to the data,” insulating users and applications from details of data
representation, scale, system architecture, and evaluation method,
while affording runtime optimization opportunities unavailable to
compile-time techniques. In what other HPC contexts might this general
approach be applied?
*	Which science domains or specific HPC applications are particularly
well-suited to this approach?
*       Can new-generation database management systems leverage HPC
hardware platforms? If so, how?

Position Papers
In this workshop, we invite 4 page position papers that define or
clarify the data challenges facing HPC, explore the design space
between the two communities, or describe work in progress bridging
these communities. Applications and platforms of interest to the HPC
community will drive the focus of the workshop. We seek new approaches
to the problems in these areas as opposed to providing yet another
broad forum for big data or “how fast can I write data to disk”
discussions. In particular, we request that each position paper
include a section considering how the work could be deployed in the
context of leadership-class computing platforms OR address a specific
application of interest in HPC (e.g., an application involving
simulation, visualization, or other typical HPC area.)

Lightning talks
We also solicit 1-page lightning talk proposals.  These talks should
start from a brief provocation designed to engender discussion.
Outrageous ideas specifically encouraged, e.g., "All HPC work should
be done in the commercial cloud."  "HPC platforms should run
relational databases."  "Relational databases are completely
obsolete."

Topics of Interest
*	New techniques for exascale IO
*	Data models and query algebras for HPC (arrays, meshes, graphs, images)
*	Query languages for parallel processing
*	HPC “data challenges”
*	Distributed data structures
*	Extending file-based systems with database features
*	DBMS on massively multicore platforms
*	Very-low footprint and main-memory DBMS architectures
*	In situ analysis via streaming and continuous queries
*	Column-stores for computational science
*	Databases and high-performance visualization
*	Simulations and linear algebra as queries
*	Batch query processing and multiple-query optimization

Submission Guidelines
We invite position papers of no more than 4 pages, following ACM
conference formatting guidelines. All submissions in PDF format.  A
collection of the best papers may be invited to a special issue of a
journal to be determined. Submit .pdf using the EasyChair site:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?a=3052822

Position papers: October 1
Notification: October 17
Workshop: November 11

Organizers
Bill Howe (University of Washington),
Kirsten Kleese-Van Dam (Pacific Northwest National Lab)
Terence Critchlow (Pacific Northwest National Labs)
Magda Balazinska (University of Washington)
Jeff Gardner (University of Washington)