[hpc-announce] CALL FOR POSITION PAPERS : Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Exascale Systems & Applications - due June 17

[Pavan Balaji]

                      CALL FOR POSITION PAPERS
                      ========================

 Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Exascale Systems & Applications
		   September 18-19, 2013, Seattle, WA

    Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Advanced
		    Scientific Computing Research

	    Workshop URL: http://hpc.pnl.gov/modsim/2013/
		Submission URL: http://j.mp/modsim2013

		      SUBMISSIONS DUE ON JUNE 17
				
Meeting the performance, energy-efficiency, and resilience requirements
of systems and applications at exascale will require rapid, accurate,
and dynamic evaluation of tradeoffs. To provide these capabilities,
significant advances in predictive modeling and simulation methods are
needed. Models are key tools in the area of application/system
co-design. As applications and systems evolve, models must be able to
track ongoing complex changes and predict the impact of developments in
both software and hardware design. While today's methods tend to focus
on application performance as the metric of concern, modeling methods
must evolve to consider performance, power consumption, and reliability
in concert. It is critical to develop tools and techniques that will
allow modeling capability to spread into the larger computational
science community where it will have the greatest possible impact.
Simulation and emulation capabilities must also expand along multiple
directions, including scalability improvements, interoperability,
support for exascale system design, and interfaces with modeling tools.

As part of the process, we solicit community input, in the form of
position papers that describe novel research approaches for performance
modeling and simulation at extreme scales. Position papers should
address one or more of the following areas.

1. Development and generation of machine and application abstractions.
Application developers need new abstract machine models that expose
expected hardware features (e.g., SIMD, lightweight cores, or
specialized functional units) and performance targets in terms of
hierarchical parallelism, scale, data movement, computational intensity,
bandwidths, latencies, and storage capacities of possible exascale
configurations, as well as non-performance objectives such as power and
resilience. Meanwhile, system architects need architecture-independent
models of important applications that they can use to identify,
understand, and evaluate application behavior on these proposed
architectures. These abstractions must exist across the modeling,
simulation, and measurement infrastructures.

2. Dynamic and Actionable Modeling. Modeling and simulation techniques
must provide predictive and optimization capabilities at runtime. This
will require the development of rapid evaluation techniques as well as
interfaces for incorporating models into the layers within the software
stack. In addition to dynamic model creation, models must be actionable.
That is, the models must enable appropriate levels of the software stack
to react to the instantaneous state of the system, both hardware and
software, and provide the necessary information that can be used to
guide and optimize system operation.

3. Standards, Integration, and Interoperability of ModSim Methodologies
and Tools. ModSim components will be integrated in different layers of
the exascale software stack and must be able to interoperate and
leverage common infrastructure including aspects such as time
progression mechanisms (e.g. in discrete-event generation), parameter
sharing, component querying for internal data, and interfaces to dynamic
models.


Submissions
===========
The Organizing Committee will review these position papers and invite
selected contributors to participate in the workshop to be held on
September 18-19, 2013, in Seattle, WA. Responsive submissions will be
made public via the workshop website and selected papers will be
included in a post-workshop proceedings.

Necessary background information, including previous workshop reports
and submission instructions, can be found at
http://hpc.pnl.gov/modsim/2013/, and submissions can be made with
EasyChair at http://j.mp/modsim2013.


Requirements
============
Position papers (up to 2 pages) should describe a fundamental computer
science research approach in the development of performance modeling and
simulation approaches to address the key challenges associated with
exascale computing systems. This description should be followed by a
brief summary of related work and an assessment of the approach based on
the following dimensions.

1. Challenges addressed: Which exascale modeling and/or simulation
challenges does this approach address?

2. Maturity: What are the indicators that this approach will address the
identified challenges?

3. Uniqueness: To what extent is the proposed approach unique to
exascale systems? Could it be addressed by other research programs?

4. Novelty: How is this approach different from existing solutions?

5. Applicability: To what extent will the proposed approach, if
successful, be applicable to other areas?

6. Effort: How much effort is needed to effectively explore this approach?

The paper may include any number of authors, but must provide contact
information for a single "contact" author. There is no limit to the
number of position papers that an individual or group can submit.
Authors are strongly encouraged to follow the structure presented above.
Authors of selected position papers will be invited to participate in a
workshop based on the overall quality of the position paper(s) and our
expectation that their inclusion in the workshop will stimulate
constructive discussion by workshop participants. Unique positions that
are well presented and emphasize transformative approaches will be given
preference.


Summary
=======
1. Length: Up to 2 pages (a list of cited references does not count
against this limit).

2. Due Date: June 17. Submission site: http://j.mp/modsim2013

3. Notification of Selection for Workshop Presentation: July 12

4. ModSim Workshop, September 18-19, 2013, Seattle, WA


Organizing Committee
====================
Adolfy Hoisie, PNNL
Darren Kerbyson, PNNL
Bob Lucas, USC
David M. Nicol, UIUC
Boyana Norris, ANL
Arun Rodrigues, SNL
John Shalf, NERSC
Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame
Jeffrey Vetter, ORNL and Georgia Tech
Sudhakar Yalamanchili, Georgia Tech