The 1st International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) will be held on May 13th/14th at Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia. IWOCL is an annual meeting of vendors, researchers and developers to promote the evolution and advancement of the OpenCL standard. The first workshop has an exciting full program, including a full day of tutorials, followed by a full day of keynotes, papers, and panels. More information can can be found here: http://iwocl.org.

Agent-Based Simulation Models are an increasingly popular tool for research and management in many fields such as ecology, economics and sociology. In some fields, such as social sciences, these models are seen as a key instrument to the generative approach, essential for understanding complex social phenomena. But also in policy-making, biology, military simulations, control of mobile robots and economics, the relevance and effectiveness of Agent-Based Simulation Models is recently recognized.

Several frameworks have been recently developed and are active in this field. They range from GPU-manycore approaches to parallel and/or distributed simulation environments.

The key objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers that are interested in getting more performances from their simulations by using:

• synchronized, many-core simulations (e.g., GPUs)
• strongly coupled, parallel simulations (e.g. MPI)
• loosely coupled, distributed simulations (distributed heterogeneous setting)

For details please visit http://www.padabs.org/

Northeastern University and Boston University, together with NVIDIA, are hosting a “GPUs Accelerating Research” Week next month.

On the first day, Wednesday 4/24, Northeastern is hosting a day of talks focused on how graphics processors are accelerating new and interesting areas of research in novel ways. The goal of this meeting is to provide a venue for both industry and academia to come together to discuss these innovations, and explore what lies ahead in GPU acceleration. Given that we have limited space in this one-day workshop, papers not selected for presentation at the workshop will have the option to present at a poster session to be held during the workshop. Please visit our website for registration and other details.

On the second day, Thursday 4/25, Boston University is hosting an all-day CUDA and OpenACC developer’s workshop. Prerequisites for getting the most out of this workshop are a basic understanding of C and the Linux command line. More details can be found here.

As the word “UnConventional” in the title suggests, the workshop focuses on hardware or platforms used for HPC, which were not intended for HPC in the first place. Reasons could be raw computing power, good performance per watt, or low cost in general. To address this unconventional hardware, often, new programming approaches and paradigms are required to make best use of it. A second focus of the workshop is on innovative, (yet) unconventional new programming models. To this end, UCHPC tries to capture solutions for HPC which are unconventional today but could become conventional and significant tomorrow, and thus provide a glimpse into the eventual future of HPC. The goal of the workshop is to present latest research in how hardware and software (yet) unconventional for HPC is or can be used to reach goals such as best performance per watt. UCHPC also covers according programming models, compiler techniques, and tools.

UCHPC is held in conjunction with Euro-Par 2013, August 26 – August 30, Aachen, Germany. More information,including the full call for papers, submission instructions and important dates: uchpc13.cs.tum.edu

High performance of modern Graphics Processing Units may be utilized not only for graphics related application but also for general computing. This computing power has been utilized in new variants of many algorithms from almost every computer science domain. Unfortunately, while other application domains strongly benefit from utilizing the GPUs, databases related applications seem not to get enough attention. The main goal of the GPUs in Databases (GID) workshop is to fill this gap. This event is devoted to sharing the knowledge related to applying GPUs in Database environments and to discuss possible future development of this application domain. The list of topics of the GID workshop includes (but is not limited to):

• Data compression on GPUs
• GPUs in databases and data warehouses
• Data mining using GPUs
• Stream processing
• Applications of GPUs in bioinformatics
• Data oriented GPU primitives

For details please visit gid.us.to.

GPU programming is now a much richer environment that it used to be a few years ago. On top of the two major programming languages, CUDA and OpenCL, libraries (e.g., cufft) and high level interfaces (e.g., thrust) have been developed that allow a fast access to the computing power of GPUs without detailed knowledge or programming of GPU hardware.

Annotation-based programming models (e.g., OpenACC), GPU plug-ins for existing mathematical software (e.g., Jacket in Matlab), GPU script languages (e.g., PyOpenCL), and new data parallel languages (e.g., Copperhead) bring GPU programming to a new level.

A major criticism of programming abstractions is that they look great on small examples but fail on practical problems. Therefore, this symposium invites, in particular, submissions that deal with practical applications that have successfully employed GPU libraries or high level programming tools. The focus may lie both on the development of the libraries or utilization of existing tools. Workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

• GPU applications coded with high level programming tools
• GPU library development and application
• Comparison of different programming abstractions on the same/similar applications
• Comparison of the same/similar programming abstractions on different applications
• Performance and coding effort of high level tools against hand-coded approaches on the GPU
• Performance and coding effort on multi-core CPUs against GPUs utilizing programming abstractions
• Classification of different programming abstractions with respect to their best application area

The highest quality papers of the minisymposium will receive an invitation to a special issue of the journal “Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience”.

Full CFP: Minisymposium on GPU Computing at the 10th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM). Note that PPAM will also host a full-day tutorial on Advanced GPU Programming.

The Third Workshop on Parallel Computing and Optimization (PCO13) is held in conjunction with the IEEE IPDPS symposium, Boston, USA, May 24, 2013. Paper submission deadline is January 4, 2013.

The workshop on Parallel Computing and Optimization aims at providing a forum for scientific researchers and engineers on recent advances in the field of parallel or distributed computing for difficult combinatorial optimization problems, like 0-1 multidimensional knapsack problems and cutting stock problems, large scale linear programming problems, nonlinear optimization problems and global optimization problems. Emphasis will be placed on new techniques for the solution of these difficult problems like cooperative methods for integer programming problems and polynomial optimization methods. Aspects related to Combinatorial Scientific Computing (CSC) will also be treated. Finally, the use of new approaches in parallel computing like GPU or hybrid computing, peer to peer computing and cloud computing will be considered. Application to planning, logistics, manufacturing, finance, telecommunications and computational biology will be considered.

Please refer to the workshop webpage at http://conf.laas.fr/PCO13 for more details, and for submission instructions.

The 21st High Performance Computing Symposium (HPC 2013), devoted to the impact of high performance computing and communications on computer simulations. Advances in multicore and many-core architectures, networking, high end computers, large data stores, and middleware capabilities are ushering in a new era of high performance parallel and distributed simulations. Along with these new capabilities come new challenges in computing and system modeling. The goal of HPC 2013 is to encourage innovation in high performance computing
and communication technologies and to promote synergistic advances in modeling methodologies and simulation. It will promote the exchange of ideas and information between universities, industry, and national laboratories about new developments in system modeling, high performance computing and communication, and scientific computing and simulation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sixth Workshop on General Purpose Processing Using GPUs (GPGPU6) is held in conjunction with ASPLOS XVIII, Houston, TX, March 17, 2013.

Overview: The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss new and emerging general-purpose purpose programming environments and platforms, as well as evaluate applications that have been able to harness the horsepower provided by these platforms. This year’s work is particularly interested on new heterogeneous GPU platforms. Papers are being sought on many aspects of GPUs, including (but not limited to):

• GPU applications + GPU compilation
• GPU programming environments + GPU power/efficiency
• GPU architectures + GPU benchmarking/measurements
• Multi-GPU systems + Heterogeneous GPU platforms

Submission Information: Authors should submit their papers using the ACM SIG Proceedings format in double-column style using the directions on the conference website at http://www.ece.neu.edu/groups/nucar/GPGPU/GPGPU6. Submitted papers will be evaluated based on originality, significance to topics, technical soundness, and presentation quality. At least one author must register and attend GPGPU to present the work. Accepted papers will be included in preliminary proceedings and distributed at the event. All papers will be made available at the workshop and will also be published in the ACM Conference Proceedings Series.

PCO13 is to be held in conjunction with IEEE IPDPS, Boston, USA, May 20-24, 2013. Paper Submission Deadline: December 21, 2012.

The workshop on Parallel Computing and Optimization aims at providing a forum for scientific researchers and engineers on recent advances in the field of parallel or distributed computing for difficult combinatorial optimization problems, like 0-1 multidimensional knapsack problems and cutting stock problems, large scale linear programming problems, nonlinear optimization problems and global optimization problems. Emphasis will be placed on new techniques for the solution of these difficult problems like cooperative methods for integer programming problems and polynomial optimization methods. Aspects related to Combinatorial Scientific Computing (CSC) will also be treated. Finally, the use of new approaches in parallel computing like GPU or hybrid computing, peer to peer computing and cloud computing will be considered. Application to planning, logistics, manufacturing, inance, telecommunications and computational biology will be considered.

Read the rest of this entry »