Scope and Motivation

MEDEA aims to continue the high level of interest of the previous editions held with PACT Conference since 2000.

Due to the ever-increasing gap between CPU and memory speed, there is always great interest in evaluating and proposing processor, multiprocessor, CMP, multi-core and system architectures dealing with the "memory wall" problem, as well as with the emerging limited bandwidth at the on-chip/off-chip interface. At the same time, a modular high-level design is becoming more and more attracting in order to reduce design costs.

In this scenario, design solutions and their corresponding performance are shaped by the combined pressure of a) technological opportunities and limitations, b) features and organization of system architecture and c) critical requirements of specific application domains. Evaluating and controlling the effects on the memory subsystem (e.g. caches or local memories, interconnections, on-chip/off-chip interfaces, coherence, consistency and communication management) of any architectural proposal is extremely important both from the performance (e.g. bandwidth, latency, predictability) and power (e.g. static, dynamic, management) points of view.

In particular, the emerging trend of single-chip multi-core solutions, will push towards new design principles for memory hierarchy and interconnection networks, especially when the design is aimed to build systems with a high number of cores, which aim to scale performance and power efficiency in a variety of application domains.

From a slightly different point of view, the mutual interaction between the application behavior and the system on which it executes, is responsible of the figures of merit of the memory subsystem and, therefore, pushes towards specific solutions. In addition, it can suggest specific compile/link time tunings for adapting the application to the features of the target architecture.

In the overall picture, power consumption requirements are increasingly important cross-cutting issues and raise specific challenges.

Typical architectural choices of interest include, but are not limited to, single processors, chip and board multiprocessors, SoC, traditional and tiled/clustered architectures, multithreaded or VLIW architectures with emphasis on single-chip design, massive parallelism designs, heterogeneous architectures, architectures equipped with application-domain accelerators as well as endowed with reconfigurable modules and GPGPUs. Application domains encompass embedded (e.g. multimedia, mobile, automotive, automation, medical), commercial (e.g. Web, DB, multimedia), scientific and networking applications, security, etc. Network on chip infrastructures, emerging photonic network and transactional memory may suggest new solutions and issues.

MEDEA Workshop wants to continue to be a forum for academic and industrial people to meet, discuss and exchange their ideas, experience and solutions in the design and evaluation of architectures for embedded, commercial and general/special purpose systems taking into account memory issues, both directly and indirectly.

Proceedings of the Workshop will be published under ACM ISBN, and appear also in the ACM Digital Library. We are trying to host a selection of papers in a Computer Architecture Journal (in progress).



The format of the workshop includes the presentation of selected papers and discussion after each presentation.



Topics of Interest:

- Memory hierarchy design, analysis and tuning for embedded, general and special purpose systems

- On-chip Multicore and System On Chip architectures, development tools and applications

o Issues in memory hierarchy design of scalable single chip systems

o Memory hierarchy issues for heterogeneous, accelerator-based systems and GPGPUs

o Solutions for embedded, DSP, commercial, scientific and technical workloads

o Inter-Chip and Intra-Chip bandwidth issues and solutions

o Inter-Chip and Intra-Chip memory latency tolerant and reduction techniques

- Coherence, consistency and communication management

- Exploitation of application parallelism (e.g.: ILP, TLP, DLP) related to memory issues

- Compile/link time optimization techniques

- Network On Chip and Photonic Networks

- Low-Power/Wire Delay design of memory hierarchies

- Transactional Memory

- Academic/industrial experience in high performance, embedded systems and memory design


Organizing and Steering Committee

Sandro Bartolini, bartolini@dii.unisi.it, Università di Siena, Italy

Pierfrancesco Foglia, foglia@iet.unipi.it, Università di Pisa, Italy

Roberto Giorgi, http://www.dii.unisi.it/~giorgi/, Università di Siena, Italy

Cosimo Antonio Prete, prete@iet.unipi.it, Università di Pisa, Italy


Information for Authors

The papers should be 6-8 pages in length. The abstracts and papers should be submitted in PDF format by email to Pierfrancesco Foglia and Sandro Bartolini. Paper should be written in standard ACM SIG Proceedings Template.

Please email submissions by July, 5 2009. You receive an acknowledgment of your submission by the following week. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by August, 7 2009 and the final papers are due by August, 25 2009.

To speed-up the reviewing process, we encourage also submission of abstract by June 28, 2009.

All submissions will be refereed, and Proceedings with ACM ISBN will be printed and distributed at the workshop (They appear in ACM DL in the following weeks).


Important Dates

June, 28 2009 Abstract Submission (not mandatory)

July, 5 2009 Paper Submission Deadline

August, 7 2009 Acceptance Notification

August, 25 2009 Final Papers Due

September, 13 2009 Workshop will start


Registration and accommodation

Attendees are requested to go to the hosting PACT'09 conference to perform the registration to Medea-2009 and make room reservations in the conference hotels. We suggest that you make your room reservation in advance and register before the advance registration deadline to benefit from combined PACT'09/Medea'09 registration fees.