IISWC-2008

September 14-16, 2008

 Seattle, WA, USA


PROGRAM

 

Day 1

September 14 (Sunday)

    Tutorials

   8:00 - 12:00 pm   Tutorial I             (20 minute coffee break at 9:50 am)

   1:30 -  5:30 pm    Tutorial II and III  (20 minute coffee break at 3:20 pm)

Day 2

September 15 (Monday)

   8:00  -  8:30am     Breakfast
   8:30  -  8:45am     Welcome
   8:45  -  9:45am     Keynote I: 
Wild Speculation on Consumer Workloads in 2010-2020
   9:45  -10:15am     Break
 10:15  -11:45am  
 Session 1: Multicore Systems

 11:45  -  1:15pm     Lunch
   1:15  -  2:45pm  
  Session 2: Benchmarks and Runtimes for Thread Parallelism
   2:45  -  3:15pm     Break
   3:15  -  4:45pm    
Session 3: Emerging Workloads

 

   6:00 pm -               IISWC excursion: Seattle underground tour event

Day 3

September 16 (Tuesday)

   8:00  -  8:45am     Breakfast
   8:45  -  9:45am     Keynote II:
We have it easy, but do we have it right?
   9:45  -10:15am     Break
 10:15  -11:45am    Session 4: Commercial Workloads
 11:45  - 1:15pm      Lunch
   1:15  - 2:15pm      Session 5: Architecture Issues
   2:15  -  2:45pm     Break
   2:45  -  4:15pm     Session 6: Workload Fidelity

 

 

Day 1 -  Sunday, September 14, 2008

 

Day 2 -  Monday, September 15, 2008

 

 8:00  - 8:30am     Breakfast
 8:30  - 8:45am     Welcome
 8:45  - 9:45am     Keynote I:
Wild Speculation on Consumer Workloads in 2010-2020 (Session chair: Tom Conte, Georgia Tech)   slide
                              
Speaker: Tim Sweeney, Epic Games Inc.

 


 9:45  -10:15am    Break
10:15 -11:45am   Session 1: Multicore Systems (Session chair: Brad Waters, Microsoft)

11:45  -1:15pm    Lunch
  1:15  - 2.45pm   Session 2: Benchmarks and Runtimes for Thread Parallelism (Session chair: Thomas Wenisch, U. of Michigan)


 2:45  - 3:15pm    Break
 3:15  - 4:45pm    Session 3: Emerging Workloads (Session chair: Engin Ipek, Microsoft Research)
 

6:00 pm -               IISWC Excursion: Seattle Underground Tour Event

 

 

Day 3 -  Tuesday, September 16, 2008

  8:00  -  8:45am     Breakfast
  8:45  -  9:45am     Keynote II:
We have it easy, but do we have it right? (Session chair: Steve Reinhardt, AMD)   slide

                                 Speaker: Amer Diwan, University of Colorado at Boulder

 


  9:45  -10:15am     Break
10:15  -11:45am     Session 4: Commercial Workloads (Session chair: Aamer Jaleel, Intel)
 


 11:45  - 1:15pm     Lunch
   1:15  - 2:15pm     Session 5: Architecture Issues (Session chair: Priya Nagpurkar, IBM Research)
 

  2:15  -  2:45pm     Break
  2:45  -  4:15pm     Session 6: Workload Fidelity (Session chair: Leslie Barnes, AMD)
 

 

Keynotes

Keynote I: Wild Speculation on Consumer Workloads in 2010-2020
Speaker: Tim Sweeney, Founder & Technical Director, Epic Games Inc.

Abstract:
Games are among the most performance-intensive consumer applications, and often lead the way in bringing research technologies into practice. This occasionally leads to non-evolutionary leaps in performance and workload characteristics, such as the 1000-fold increase in 3D throughput enabled by consumer graphics accelerators beginning in 1998.

The speaker will argue that another revolution in consumer computing performance is on the horizon, driven by large-scale multi-core CPUs with vector-processing extensions inspired by today's graphics processors (GPUs). He will present a view of the key problems and solutions facing consumer software developers in 2010-2020, and speculate on the shape and scale of workloads in that timeframe. The essential questions to cover are: What portions of an application can scale effectively to many cores and vector processors? How and when can concurrency research bring techniques like functional programming, software transactional memory, and vectorization into mainstream practice?

Speaker's bio:
Tim Sweeney founded Epic Games in 1991 and wrote two of the company's early shareware games, ZZT and Jill of the Jungle. From 1995 to 1998, he wrote the first Unreal Engine, which powered a number of hit games including Unreal Tournament, Splinter Cell, Harry Potter, and Deus Ex. Today, Sweeney is overseeing the development of its latest Unreal Engine 3 technology while working on early R&D efforts for the following generation, aimed at large-scale multi-core processors.

 

 

Keynote II: We have it easy, but do we have it right?
Speaker: Amer Diwan, Associate Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder

Abstract:

To evaluate an innovation in computer systems, performance analysts measure execution time or other metrics using one or more standard workloads. The performance analyst may carefully minimize the amount of measurement instrumentation, control the environment in which measurement takes place, and repeat each measurement multiple times. Finally, the performance analyst may use statistical techniques to characterize the data.

Unfortunately, even with such a responsible approach, the collected data may be misleading due to measurement bias and observer effect. Measurement bias occurs when the experimental setup inadvertently favors a particular outcome.
Observer effect occurs if data collection alters the behavior of the system being measured. This talk demonstrates that observer effect and measurement bias are (i) large enough to mislead performance analysts; and (ii) common enough that they cannot be ignored.

While these phenomenon are well known to the natural and social sciences this talk will demonstrate that research in computer systems typically does not take adequate measures to guard against measurement bias and observer effect.

Speaker's Bio:
Amer Diwan is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Before joining the University of Colorado, he was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for his PhD and at Stanford University for his postdoc. His research interests include tools and techniques for understanding program performance, programmer productivity tools, program analysis, memory management, and compiler optimizations.