REFAC'20: 2nd International Workshop on Legacy Software Refactoring for Performance |
Website | https://refac-ws.gitlab.io/2020/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=refac20 |
Submission deadline | April 22, 2020 |
The "2nd International Workshop on Legacy Software REFACtoring for Performance" held in conjunction with the ISC High Performance conference (ISC'20) in Frankfurt am Main 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.
Workshop Scope
The list of topics we will highly encourage for submissions includes, but is not limited to, the following interdisciplinary research areas:
- 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 axillary tools used in HPC environments,
- Improved maintainability and performance through the use of existing production libraries,
- Revisiting and applying modern compiler (flag) 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 mixed or adaptive precision wherever possible.
It is important to mention that all time-to-solution optimizations must be performed under the premise that the results produced by the scientific code are either 1:1 comparable, won't break numerical stability, or pass a given set of verifications tests, in case the application/library includes such correctness checking. Hence, HPC experts submitting to our workshop are advised to collaborate with domain experts while performing such optimizations. Furthermore, we look forward to cost saving estimates, based on CPU cycles spend by the software vs. CPU cycles saved through optimization while using realistic data/input sets, in the submitted manuscripts.
Submission Guidelines
All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. Submission must adhere to:
- Only accepted style: LNCS (see Springer's website)
- Single column format
- No modification to font size of LNCS template
- Maximum of 10 pages (min. 6) in PDF format, including figures and references
(incorrectly formatted papers will be excluded)
Committees
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)
Organizing committee
- Mohamed Wahib (RWBC-OIL, AIST, Japan)
- Jens Domke (R-CCS, RIKEN, Japan)
- Artur Podobas (R-CCS, RIKEN, Japan)
Contact
Please, use the email form at the bottom of the workshop website: https://refac-ws.gitlab.io/2020/ , or directly contact refac20(at)easychair.org, to submit questions to the workshop organizers.