To be held with the ISPASS Conference: http://ispass.org/ispass2012

GOAL
FastPath brings together researchers and practitioners involved in cross-stack hardware/software performance analysis, evaluation, and modeling of workload optimized systems.

OVERVIEW

With microprocessor clock speeds being held constant, optimizing systems around specific workloads is an increasingly attractive means to improve performance. The importance of workload optimized systems is seen in their ubiquitous deployment in diverse systems from cellphones to tablets to routers to game machines to Top500 supercomputers, and IT appliances such as IBM's DataPower and Netezza, and Oracle's Exadata.

More precisely, workload optimized systems have hardware and/or software specifically designed to run well for a particular application or application class. The types and components of workload optimized systems vary, but a partial list includes traditional CPUs assisted with accelerators (ASICs, FPGAs, GPUs), memory accelerators, I/O accelerators, hybrid systems, and IT appliances.