...a workshop at PACT 2007
NEW! The workshop programme is now available.
PACT 2007 is the Sixteenth International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT) and will take place in Brasov, Romania on September 15-19, 2007. The OS for Heterogeneous Multicore Architectures meeting will be a half-day workshop taking place as part of PACT, on the morning of Saturday 15th September 2007.
Mainstream commodity CPUs are increasingly being developed as multicore architectures. Current trends make it clear that future mainstream devices will have substantially increased internal parallelism due to the many-core and hyperthreading technologies now being employed. While many multicore designs are homogeneous, consisting of multiple identical CPU cores, an increasing number of architectures are exploiting different degrees of heterogeneity, using cores specialised for specific activities. Originally targeted at specialised applications, such as network processing or console gaming, these heterogeneous multicore architectures are gaining increasing traction in general purpose computing. Examples range from having multiple variants of the x86 architecture on a single chip, to truly heterogeneous platforms combining components that use different instruction sets and a plethora of memories. A key element of the heterogeneous multicore "puzzle" is how Operating Systems can exploit and support these challenging architectures, particularly as they move away from specialist applications into general usage.
The OSHMA workshop at PACT'07 will bring together researchers from the OS, hardware and language communities to address the issues raised for operating systems by heterogeneous multicore architectures.