Proceedings of the 5th conference on Computing frontiers (2008)

We are pleased to introduce the technical program of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computing Frontiers, the fifth in the series. The conference was established as a forum to present and discuss explorations of territory at the edge of computing, perhaps risky, but intellectually challenging and with the potential to substantially improve the state of the art. In this context, papers have been solicited and submitted on theory, methods, technologies, and implementations concerned with innovations in computing paradigms, computational models, architectural paradigms, computer architectures, development environments, compilers, and operating environments.

This year's program includes 30 technical papers selected out of 110 submissions (a 27% acceptance rate). There were more submissions of high quality and relevance than could be accommodated in a three-day technical program. To capture a wider spectrum of contributions, a number of authors were invited to present their work in a poster session. This session will enrich the program and will provide further occasions of lively debate on exciting and innovative ideas. Overall, the conference will cover a broad range of topics. On the architectural side, there are papers on chip multiprocessors, graphic processing units, and reconfigurable architectures. A number of contributions explore how algorithms in a variety of application domains can take advantage of these novel platforms. A few presentation will consider the challenge of compiling for innovative architectures. Other papers focus on interesting programming paradigms and their hardware support.

The technical program is further enriched by three invited keynote talks. Keshav Pingali will explore the vast, important, but largely uncharted territory of irregular parallel programs, where considerable progress is needed before the performance potential of current and future hardware can be fully harnessed. Valentina Salapura will assess the state of the art of high-end supercomputing and its scalability to ever higher performance, based on the experience of the novel Blue Gene/P system. Raffaele Tripiccione will report on the innovative JANUS system, illustrating how, for certain classes of scientific problems, reconfigurable architectures can deliver very substantial performance improvements over traditional microprocessors.

A scientific event can only be as good as its scientific content. Thus, for the excellent technical program of the conference, we want to express our appreciation to the large number of authors who submitted their work to Computing Frontiers 2008 as well as to the speakers who have accepted to deliver keynote talks. Selecting a subset of the submissions under the scientific as well as the logistic constraints of the conference is the hard, delicate job of the Program Committee. We are truly thankful for the terrific work done by the Computing Frontiers 2008 program committee members as well as by the referees enlisted by them in the process. This effort has resulted in nearly 400 reviews, which have been crucial to the selection process and, equally importantly, have provided a very substantial amount of feedback to the authors, which we hope they have found useful and constructive.

It goes without saying that the General Chair has a significant impact on the overall success of a conference. However, we do want to take this opportunity to especially thank our General Chair, Alex Ramirez, for the extremely generous help he has given us on all matters, large and small, from advice on how to strengthen the tradition of this young conference to the effective supervision of the submission site, which ensured a smooth submission and review process.

We are proud to have a Stamatis Vassiliadis Best Paper Award, established with the support of the Technical University of Delft. The award will recognize the best contribution to the conference and at the same time honor the of Stamatis, a founder of Computing Frontiers and a dear colleague, tragically taken from us by a sudden illness last year.

Two workshops, respectively on memory access on future processors and on radiation effects and fault tolerance in nanometer technologies will be co-located with Computing Frontiers 2008. A special one-day session will present projects funded under the first Computing System call in the 7th Framework Program of the European Union. These three events will provide further opportunities for exchanges and debates on relevant topics and enrich the technical experience in Ischia.