HiPEAC celebrates 10 years of achievement
Ten years ago, the HiPEAC network of excellence was created. HiPEAC stands for High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation. HiPEAC started by providing seed funding for self-organized collaborations between European research teams, created the HiPEAC conference and the ACACES summer school and started publishing bi-annual vision documents listing the upcoming research challenges in computing systems in Europe. HiPEAC has since then become the premier platform for networking and collaboration in the domain of computing systems in Europe – now serving, inspiring, and leading a vibrant community of 1500 computing systems researchers, and resulting in measurable impact. Mateo Valero, Director at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, and founder of HiPEAC explains that “HiPEAC clearly transformed the computing system community in Europe. Before HiPEAC we had to travel to the United State to occasionally meet European colleagues. Today, European researchers meet their peers in Europe to discuss research and to collaborate”. Always looking for innovations Koen De Bosschere, professor at Ghent University, and coordinator of the network, explains that HiPEAC wants to be innovative and even disruptive in the activities it is organizing. “Three years ago we made the bold move to convert the HiPEAC conference from an academic publication event into a broad networking event, more than doubling the number of participants, while introducing an innovative journal-first publication model in collaboration with the ACM TACO journal”. The HiPEAC conference is now the second biggest conference in computing systems in Europe, and growing. Another innovative pilot activity is the “block review”. For the first time, 12 EU-funded projects will be reviewed during a HiPEAC networking event. Dr. Max Lemke, Head of Unit Complex Systems and Advanced Computing of the European Commission stresses that a block review stimulates projects to interact and to network, to learn from each other, and to brainstorm about ways to maximize their impact. The fact that the block review is co-located with the HiPEAC computing systems week creates additional value to the review process. A network with a vision HiPEAC wants to inspire its members, but to also steer computing systems research in Europe. Under the leadership of Marc Duranton, the bi-annual HiPEAC roadmap has become one of the key strategic documents steering Europe’s investments in computing systems. He explains “Over the years, we have learned how to turn the insights of more than 1000 members into a coherent vision, which is accessible, and can be used by our members to orient their research. We take into account the market trends, the technology constraints and opportunities to create recommendations and a vision document updated every two years”, he adds. On the horizon Looking forward, HiPEAC wants to remain a key player in the computing systems community under Horizon 2020. “We’ve been going strong for a decade now, and are ready to run for another 10 years,” notes De Bosschere. “Now that we understand the needs of the European community we can better address them and continue to drive initiatives that will help impact the state of research and development in Europe.” About HiPEAC The HiPEAC network is an FP7 project which gathers about 1500 researchers in computing systems in Europe. It is the biggest such network in the world, offering training, mobility support, dissemination services, and abundant networking facilities to its members. The yearly budget of the network is about 1 M Euro. The third edition of HiPEAC started on January 2012, and will run until December 2015. It is run by a consortium of six universities, one research institute and five companies. It is coordinated by Ghent University. See also www.hipeac.net.
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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