One workshop will be organized together with the ARCS conference:

• Workshop on Runtime, Operating Systems and Middleware for Emerging Systems (ROME)

A short summary is provided below. For more information see the web sites of the individual workshop.

High-performance computing itself is a well-established scientific domain. However, to pave the way towards exascale, further evolutionary steps are currently required to be taken by moving away from common multi-/many-core clusters towards novel and innovative heterogeneous architectures. Such systems, equipped with a significantly higher number of (heterogeneous) cores than today’s supercomputers, pose challenges in both hardware and software design. On the hardware side, new processor and accelerator architectures, complex on-chip networks, deep memory-hierarchies and interconnect technologies will enrich the respective research areas. However, in keeping with its tradition, the ROME workshop focuses on the software side because without complying system software, runtime and operating system support, all these new hardware facilities cannot be exploited. Hence, the challenges in hardware/software co-design are to step beyond traditional approaches and to venture new strategies for runtime, middleware and operating system designs in order to exploit the theoretically available performance of upcoming hardware features as effectively and energy-consciously as possible. For gaining the required power-efficiency, scalability and manageability an exascale system will demand for, both virtualization as well as machine-oriented optimization will have to be exploited jointly. For doing so, customized operating systems, hypervisors and unikernels will be required to leverage an efficient employment of virtualization and an effective machine optimization on a broader scale – which has of course to be supported and enhanced by a corresponding runtime and middleware.

Further information are available on the ROME Webpage.