Recent trends in the microprocessor industry have important ramifications for the design of the next generation of high-performance computing systems. By increasing number of cores, it is possible to improve the performance while keeping the power consumption unchanged. This trend has reached all areas of computing, ranging from high-performance computers to embedded multicore systems. Multicore systems need to be able to reconfigure themselves dynamically by monitoring their own condition and the surrounding environment in order to adapt themselves to different scenarios and performance-power requirements. Runtime monitoring becomes crucial in the emerging and future parallel and distributed multicore systems due to increase in variations and fault occurrences, thermal issues as well as due to the need for various dynamic optimizations. Furthermore, to obtain optimal performance-power ratio and to have system wide adaptability, for both single-chip and physically distributed multicore systems, monitoring and reconfiguration are essential.


Special Session Scope

This special session addresses all aspects of monitoring and reconfiguration of parallel and distributed multicore systems. It presents new ideas in the multicore field such as theory and modeling, scalable and fault tolerant design approaches and frameworks, algorithms, analysis and comparison, design techniques and emerging implementations.

Authors are invited to submit high quality papers representing original work from both the academia and industry in (but not limited to) the following topics:

* Scalable monitoring architectures for multicore systems
* Monitoring and reconfiguration for NoC-based multicore systems
* Methods for distributed parallel system monitoring and reconfiguration
* Low-power monitor and sensor circuits
* Energy-aware architectures and computing
* Reconfiguration for fault tolerant and diagnostic system monitoring
* Thermal-aware architectures
* Monitoring techniques for FPGA based designs
* Monitoring architectures for 3D multicore systems
* Embedded multicore real-time systems
* Design space exploration and tradeoff analysis
* Dynamic coherence protocols
* Formal methods for modeling, design and verification of monitoring and reconfiguration
* On-line testing, design of checkers
* Cases studies of multicore systems demonstrating monitoring and/or reconfiguration implementation

The proceedings of the special session will be published together with the proceedings of PDP 2013 by the IEEE Computer Society Press.

An extended version of the best papers will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Design, Analysis and Tools for Integrated Circuits and Systems (IJDATICS).

Chairs:

* Amir-Mohammad Rahmani, University of Turku and Turku Centre for Computer Science, Finland
* Pasi Liljeberg, University of Turku, Finland
* Juha Plosila, University of Turku, Finland