Workshop on Parallelism

Phil Gibbons, Howard Karloff and Sergei Vassilvitski are organizing a much-needed workshop on parallelism with 360 degrees view at DIMACS. Contact the organizers if you would like to attend.

Parallelism: A 2020 Vision
Decades after its origins and its study in academia, parallel computing is finally becoming pervasive. Today's PCs have multiple cores, and some predict 1000-core machines in the near future. Google, Yahoo and others run MapReduce or Hadoop on thousands of machines to answer search queries, among other things. D. E. Shaw Research is building a massively parallel machine to simulate molecular dynamics. Climate scientists predict the evolution of the earth's climate on parallel machines. Amazon's EC^2 enables users to run jobs on a "cloud" of PCs.

The evolution of parallel computing from primarily an academic subject in the '80s to its realization today is an exciting development. This DIMACS workshop will bring together some of the leading researchers and practitioners involved in parallel computing to describe their work. Attendees will discuss, for example:
* how parallel computing in its various forms is used today;
* what new uses and programming abstractions will arise by 2020;
* what parallel computers will look like in 2020; and
* how to model parallelism theoretically.

The workshop will occur on March 14-16, the first two days of which will be devoted to invited talks, the last to contributed talks.