This symposium is intended to give delegates an understanding of multi-core architectures and parallel programming models. Attendees will get an appreciation of the problems and solutions researchers have identified in the field of multi-core computing, and be able to evolve a framework with which they can take design decisions in their multi-core system development. For two decades, software developers have relied on Moore’s Law to enjoy an increase in application performance. Much of this performance gain resulted from increasing clock speeds. However, power and temperature concerns make this impossible to sustain in the future. The future of architecture designs lies in multi-cores, i.e., processors with multiple simpler cores running at lower frequencies. As a consequence, all computer systems today -- from embedded devices to high-end servers -- are being built with multi-core processors. Applications will have to be repartitioned, and in most cases re-written, to run efficiently on the new multi–core processors. Although researchers in industry and academia are exploring different hardware design choices for multi-core processors, almost all of them agree that software for execution on multi-core processors is the major unresolved problem.

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Unlike earlier generations of hardware evolution, this shift will have a major impact on how software is designed and developed. Developers will have to re-learn how to design their applications to utilize multi-core parallelism. Opportunities to address the problem span multiple levels of the software stack.

This Symposium will focus on the entire spectrum of the software stack as it applies to multi-core architectures, including libraries, tools, programming languages, compilers, run-time systems, operating systems and application design.

This three day Symposium will consist of lectures and discussions about current multi-core architectures and parallel programming models. Delegates are also invited to submit topics of current interest for a roundtable meet with industry and academic experts. We will have informal roundtable discussions on selected topics at the start of each day, and present the summary of these meetings at the last session of the event.

The roundtable format enables sharing of information, allowing each participant a voice. At the start of a session a quick overview of the topic will be presented by an identified participant. Each of three breakout groups will then discuss the topic to outline their perceptions of the challenges, opportunities and potential solutions or next steps for that topical area. The groups will then come back together to present opinions and findings to all participants.