This 3-day workshop, to be held  September 30, 2009 to October 2, 2009 in Lugano, Switzerland, will explore the use of GPUs, Cell BE processors FPGAs and special-purpose hardware for large-scale scientific computing.

Similar to the 1990s, when the revolution in mainstream scientific software development, viz. going from structured programming to object-oriented programming, was the greatest change in the past 3 decades, we are at the beginning of a totally new revolution in terms of algorithmic engineering.

We are nowadays at a hardware/software technology inflection point due to large-scale parallelism, including parallel operations on the contents of a single register, pipelining, memory pre-fetch, single-core simultaneous multithreading (”hyper-threading”) and superscalar instruction issue. Some new processor options have emerged, such as the Cell BE processor and GPUs, which are extremely aggressive in their use of parallelism, while keeping, on the other hand, general-purpose programmability. Other processors, like FPGAs and special purpose hardware, still based on chip parallelism, are emerging for being extremely and efficiently specialized for unique tasks.

The main objective will be to demonstrate how some of the most challenging problems in computational sciences have already been ported to modern non-conventional computing platforms, presented by speakers coming from a wide computational community (physicists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists, biologists) active in the fields of algorithm re-engineering for the new architectures.