[hpc-announce] CFP: Workshop on Legacy Software Refactoring for Performance 2020 [Deadline: April 8th, 2020] [Co-held with ISC 2020, Frankfurt, Germany]

[Mohamed Wahib]

REFAC'20

2nd International Workshop on Legacy Software Refactoring for Performance (REFAC'20)
https://refac-ws.gitlab.io/2020/


CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2nd International Workshop on Legacy Software Refactoring for Performance (REFAC'20) will be held in conjunction with The ISC High Performance Conference (ISC 2020), https://www.isc-hpc.com


Final submission Deadline: April 8, 2020



SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES

The second International Workshop on Legacy Software REFACtoring for Performance is the first event of its kind that is dedicated to the much needed shift in focus from hardware to software to achieve performance gains. Modernizing hardware has too long been the primary method of accelerating legacy software, and close to half of the expected performance improvement in legacy codes can be attributed to improve processor technology.
Unfortunately, we are no longer seeing the consistent technology scaling. Instead, the technology scaling has significantly slowed down, and is expected to continue only for a few more years. Consequently, in the so-called Post-Moore era, the "performance road" forks three-ways, yielding the following alternatives: (1) architectural innovations, (2) alternative materials and technologies, or (3) we abandon the von-Neumann paradigm altogether.
Independent on what direction we will end up taking in the future, the following will hold: software and algorithmic optimization will be transferable to the first two out of the three identified directions. Hence, our workshop focuses on maintainable and architecture-oblivious optimizations of legacy HPC software, libraries, and workflows. With this, we mean optimizations that are transferable across computer systems and architectures, and that remain portable and pose little to none maintenance costs.

The REFAC workshop's interdisciplinary R&D topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
- All types of general-purpose processor legacy-software optimizations for HPC,
- Changes to (collective) communication algorithms or implementations to enable the use of different numerical methods (for example: Lagrangian vs. Eulerian),
- Accelerating of pre-/post-processing in a scientific workflows or auxiliary tools used in HPC environments,
- Improved maintainability and performance through the use of existing production libraries,
- Revisiting and applying modern compiler techniques, performance analysis tools, moderate usage of OpenMP pragmas, etc., for performance gains,
- Manual code refactoring, such as loop transformations or changing data structures, to acknowledge the shifting ratio in memory vs. compute capabilities of modern architectures, and
- Using approximate computing, mixed precision, or adaptive precision wherever possible.



INSTRUCTIONS FOR PAPER SUBMISSIONS

You are invited to submit original and unpublished research works on above topics. Submitted papers must not have been published or simultaneously submitted elsewhere. The submitted paper must not exceed 10 pages (inclusive of figures and references) and formatted according to the Springer LNCS rules (Lecture Notes in Computer Science). Guidelines and templates can be found at:  http://www.springer.com/it/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

To submit a paper, please connect to the submission site from the link available on our REFAC'20 website: https://refac-ws.gitlab.io/2020/ , or directly using the EasyChair link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=refac20  (submission website will open on March 1). Only papers submitted through the electronic system and strictly adhering to the relevant format will be considered for reviewing and publication.

Please, use the email form at the bottom of our workshop website, or directly contact refac20(at)easychair.org, to submit questions to the workshop organizers.



IMPORTANT DATES

   April    8, 2020:  Deadline for paper submission
   May    1, 2020:  Notification of acceptance
   May  31, 2020:  Camera ready version
   June 25, 2020:  Workshop @ISC 2020 conference



WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

   Mohamed Wahib  (AIST/Tokyo Open Innovation Laboratory & RIKEN Center for Computational Science)
   Jens Domke           (RIKEN Center for Computational Science)
   Artur Podobas      (RIKEN Center for Computational Science)

   Technical Program Committee:
   Anshu Dubey                   (ANL, USA)
   Daniel Molka                   (German Aerospace Center)
   Hisashi Yashiro                (NIES, Japan)
   Matthias Maiterth          (LMU Munich, Germany)
   Niclas Jansson                  (PDC/KTH, Sweden)
   Saurabh Chawdhary        (ANL, USA)
   Shoshana A. Jakobovits   (CSCS-ETHZ, Switzerland)
   Tapasya Patki                    (LLNL, USA)