Wild and Sane Ideas in Speculation and Transactions

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Deadline: August 22, 2011 | Date: October 10, 2011

Venue/Country: Texas, U.S.A

Updated: 2011-07-15 16:35:52 (GMT+9)

Call For Papers - CFP

Co-Located with PACT-2011

Galveston Island, Texas, USA

October 10, 2011

As a research community, we have seen transactional memory and other forms of speculative execution ride the wave of the Gartner hype cycle from "next big thing" to the "trough of disillusionment". While these technologies appear to be slowly climbing the "slope of enlightenment", through this workshop, we hope to give them a jolt of encouragement. If best-effort hardware support for speculation and rollback is given (as exemplified by Azul/Transmeta/Sun Rock/AMD ASF), what alternative uses might it have? What new possibilities would emerge if systems supported no-overhead/infinite speculative footprints?

Given such a substrate, what new microarchitectural optimizations are possible? How can various layers of the system stack use such features? What programming abstractions are possible to the developer, beyond transactions? What impact would unbounded speculation have on operating system services, virtualization, debuggers, profilers, I/O, and accelerators?

The workshop will consist of a set of presentations/positions on all things speculative: authors should submit a 2-4 page abstract (details below) summarizing their idea, position, vision, or dream. Supporting these ideas through quantitative evidence is acceptable but not required. In this spirit, we hope to capture the enthusiasm of successful "Wild and Crazy" idea sessions of years past, while keeping the program sane enough that all presentations are subject to serious thought and reflection.

Submission Topics Include

Profligate hardware support for transactions

Speculative programming constructs for single-threaded or parallel performance

New transactional semantics

Unconventional uses of hardware support for speculation

Thread-level speculation and other forms of implicit parallelism

Theoretical models of speculative execution

Interaction of speculation and I/O devices or accelerators

Nested speculation

Profiling and debugging of speculative systems

Interactions with operating systems and virtualization

Reacting and adapting to misspeculation

Speculation in tightly-coupled (e.g. multicore) and loosely coupled (cloud) systems

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit their ideas in the form of 2-4 page papers, excluding bibliography. To ensure submissions are accessible to a broad audience of researchers in Languages, Compilers, Operating Systems, Architectures, and Run-Time Systems, we ask authors to include a brief background section. Papers will be reviewed for their novelty, ability to cut across areas, and ability to generate discussion.

All paper submissions should be made electronically. The link for submitting papers will appear on this page within a few weeks. Note that there will not be a printed proceedings, nor will accepted abstracts appear in any electronic archival form.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: August 22, 2011 9:00 AM EDT (GMT - 5:00)

Notifications: September 9, 2011

Final Copy Due: September 26, 2011

Workshop: October 10, 2011