Special Sessions

For the first time, the HEART symposium will offer special sessions on application areas where efficient acceleration and reconfigurable technologies are on the way to get highly relevant. The format of these special session is more liberal than a regular research paper sessions and can be tailored by the organizers to suit the topic and include, for example, invited talks, panel discussions, lightning talk presentations, and interactive elements.

We are happy to announce that we have found three organizer teams to start this new format at the HEART symposium with the following topics:

Special Session 1 (Monday): FPGAs for HPC: Open Challenges for Infrastructure and System Operation

Chairs: Kentaro Sano (RIKEN), Tomohiro Ueno (RIKEN)

As the semiconductor technology advancement driven by Moore's law is slowing down, the importance of reconfigurable computing with FPGAs is getting more important with significant existence in the HPC community as well as data center industries. Although FPGA devices and their design tools have advanced much in the last decade, we do not have sufficient knowledge and experience about the infrastructure and operation of FPGA-based or FPGA-involved HPC systems while we have several academic efforts to prototype FPGA-based HPC systems such as Cygnus at University of Tsukuba, Noctua at Paderborn University, ESSPER at RIKEN R-CCS, and so on. In this special session, we have a panel discussion regarding open challenges for Infrastructure and operation of FPGA-based HPC systems followed by Keynote speech and lightning talks on experiences of HPC using FPGAs.

Special Session 2 (Tuesday): "High-performance Computing: Open Challenges as a Result of the Growing User-Hardware Gap"

Chairs: Holger Fröning (Universität Heidelberg), Felix Zahn (CERN)

In recent years, we have witnessed many fundamental changes in the broad context of high-performance computing, including the end of Dennard scaling with a fundamental paradigm shift towards performance scaling, accelerators and heterogeneity with implications on programmability, as well as a widened set of applications such as machine learning. As a result, the complexity of HPC systems is significantly increasing while at the same time user access is broadened to new communities with less expertise on the details of HPC architectures. These two trends are developing in opposite directions, creating respectively widening the gap in between user and hardware. In this session we will learn about two opinions how to tackle this problem: one focuses on improvements of programmability and productivity, while the other considers a wider range of aspects from programmability to operation.

Special Session 3 (Wednesday: "Mobile Systems / Edge Computing / Internet of Things"

Chairs: Smail Niar (Universityé Polytechnique Hauts-de-France), Ihsen Alouani (Universityé Polytechnique Hauts-de-France)