Preparing for the future at HiPEAC 2014 Record attendance at the HiPEAC 2014 conference in Vienna proves that the computing systems community in Europe is growing fast and eager to increase its impact in Europe and beyond. January 29, 2014 -- Last week, scientists, academics, and industry leaders gathered at the HiPEAC 2014 conference in Vienna to discuss research, collaborate, and prepare for ambitious future research projects. Alongside traditional themes such as power consumption, big data, and the internet of things, this year’s conference showed some distinctive new trends: the use of memristors to implement non-volatile memory and silicon photonics to speed up interconnects. There was also an increased focus on secure computing systems. “With 530 delegates from 37 countries around the world, 63 companies, 44 research projects, there was certainly no shortage of networking opportunities at the conference,” noted Jens Knoop, Professor at the Technical University of Vienna and general chair of the conference. “This was definitely the most successful conference ever organized by the HiPEAC network” added Koen De Bosschere, coordinator of the HiPEAC Network. Officials from the European Commission presented details of the Horizon2020 framework program and organized a consortium meeting with all the project coordinators of EU computing systems projects. “Constituency building in large scale networking events like the HiPEAC conference is essential for defining the European research agenda in computing systems” stated Max Lemke, Head of Unit of "Complex Systems and Advanced Computing" in DG CONNECT of the European Commission. “Here, the European computing systems community shows its potential to the world.” New stars on the horizon: a peek into the future The program included a roundup of new technologies such as silicon photonics and memristors, which may be used in the future to build advanced computing systems. As explained by Jose M Garcia and Sandro Bartolini, organizers of the SiPhotonics workshop, silicion photonics integrates a photonic layer with electronic circuits and holds the promise of low-latency and low energy cost for on-chip communications, higher bandwidth, and low manufacturing costs in existing fabs. "The main advantages of silicon photonics for computing systems are the use of standard tools and foundry—which means wafer scale co-integration for low manufacturing costs—alongside high integration, low energy consumption and high bandwidth," said Garcia. Another workshop, led by Said Hamdioui, provided a European forum to discuss and exchange ideas about the emerging memristor technology and its potential applications. Memristor, a new circuit element that stores information in resistors, holds great potential for high-density storage devices. “Memristor technology promises tremendous advantages such as energy efficiency, higher density, reconfigurability, massive parallelism, CMOS compatibility, and low cost,” stated Hamdioui. “This makes it very suitable for solving some of today’s computational challenges and may eventually force us to revise existing computing and storage paradigms.” The conference also showed an increased awareness about privacy and safety, as demonstrated by the new workshop on cryptography and security in computing systems. “With software running on devices that now store, track, drive, and control almost all aspects of our life, these applications also have to safe-guard us and the people around us,” stated Bjorn De Sutter, coordinator of the FP7 Aspire project and keynote speaker at the workshop. “Computer security, including software protection, has therefore become crucial to our well-being, and vast challenges remain in that domain.” Unique journal-first publishing model The HiPEAC conference incorporates a unique model in which the main track only contains invited presentation of papers published in ACM TACO in 2013. The only way to get a presentation slot at the conference is to get a paper accepted in ACM TACO - Transactions on Architecture and Compilation. “The advantage is that authors can seriously revise their manuscript based on the feedback by the reviewers, leading to top-quality papers”, noted De Bosschere. “We like this model because it offers the best of both worlds – journal publication and conference presentation.” More information about the conference: http://www.hipeac.net/conference/vienna Don’t get left behind HiPEAC is always open to new members from European academia and industry. Members can enjoy benefits, such as networking, training, news, and mobility support, without any legal obligations. For more information and updates, visit the HiPEAC site: http://www.hipeac.net Keywords High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation Countries Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, United Kingdom
