Please refer to CAC '05 website for details on the upcoming CAC '05 workshop.

Workshop on Communication Architecture for Clusters

CAC '04

To be held in Conjunction with
Int'l Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS '04)
Santa Fe, New Mexico Eldorado Hotel, April 26-30, 2004

Advance Program

April 26 (Monday)

7:50 -  8:00 Welcome and Workshop Introduction

8:00 -  9:00 Keynote Talk

Mark Seager, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Title: Communication Architecture Challenges for a High Performance Multi-Cluster Simulation Environment

9:00 -  10:00 Session I

Communication and NIC Support
Session Chair: Fabrizio Petrini, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Each presentation is for 25 minutes. The last 10 minutes of the session is for discussion.

10:00 -  10:30 Break

10:30 -  12:00 Session II

Novel MPI Implementation
Session Chair: Scott Pakin, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Each presentation is for 25 minutes. The last 15 minutes of the session is for discussion.

12:00 -  1:30 Lunch (On your own)

 1:30 -  2:30 Session III

Routing and Reconfiguration in InfiniBand
Session Chair: Jarek Nieplocha, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Each presentation is for 25 minutes. The last 10 minutes of the session is for discussion.

 2:30 -  2:50 Break

 2:50 -  4:20 Session IV

Communication Impact on Systems
Session Chair: Arthur B. (Barney) Maccabe, Univ. of New Mexico

Each presentation is for 25 minutes. The last 15 minutes of the session is for discussion.

 4:20 -  4:30 Short Break

 4:30 -  6:00 Panel Session

Title: Cluster Architecture: Standardized Dystopia, or Teething Pains?

Description: Clusters are a successful system architecture by any standard. Reflecting that, many key cluster elements are formally standardized or on the way to it. Yet problems are still reported in areas like efficiency, debugging, and tuning. Are these misperceptions, "teething pains" of new tools, or are we freezing fundamental problems into standards - and if so, what, and what directions should we take to fix this?

Moderator: Greg Pfister, IBM

Panelists:
Ron Brightwell, Sandia National Lab
Arthur B. (Barney) Maccebe, Univ. of New Mexico
Jarek Nieplocha, Pacific Northwest National Lab
Fabrizio Petrini, Los Alamos National Lab

 6:00 - Adjourn

Registration and Hotel information

Workshop registration is handled by the IPDPS '04 conference. There is a single registration for the conference and all of its 17 workshops. Please visit IPDPS'04 web page for registration and hotel information.

Deadline for hotel reservation is March 31, 2004 and deadline for advance registration is April 12, 2004.

Call For Papers

THEME:

The availability of commodity PCs/workstations and high-speed networks (Local Area Networks and System Area Networks) at low prices enabled the development of low-cost clusters. These clusters are being targeted for support of traditional high-end computing applications as well as emerging applications, especially those requiring high-performance servers. Designing high-performance and scalable clusters for these emerging applications requires design and development of high-performance communication and I/O subsystems, low-overhead programming environment support and support for Quality of Service (QoS). New standards such as InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) and PCI Express AS, and availability of high-speed networking products (Myrinet, Quadrics, IBA 4X, and 10GigEthernet) are providing exciting ways to design high-performance communication and I/O architectures for clusters.

A large number of research groups from academia, industry, and research labs are currently engaged in the above research directions. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the areas of communication, I/O, and architecture to discuss state-of-the-art solutions as well as future trends for designing scalable, high-performance, and cost-effective communication and I/O architectures for clusters.

The first three workshops in this series (CAC '01, CAC '02, and CAC '03) were held in conjunction with IPDPS conferences, and they were very successful. The CAC '04 workshop plans to continue this tradition.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

Topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to:
  1. Router/switch, network, and network-interface architecture for supporting efficient point-to-point communication, collective communication, and I/O at intra-cluster and inter-cluster levels.
  2. Design, development, and implementation of low-level communication and I/O protocols (GM, TCP/IP, VAPI, SDP, DAPL, SRP, iSCSI, RDMA over IP, etc) on different networking and interconnect technologies (such as Myrinet, 10Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand, Quadrics, TCP Offload Engine, etc.).
  3. High-performance implementation of different programming layers (Message Passing Interface (MPI), Distributed Shared Memory such as TreadMarks, Get/Put, Global Arrays, sockets, etc.) and File Systems (such as PVFS and DAFS).
  4. Communication and architectural issues related to switch organization, flow control, congestion control, routing and deadlock-handling, load balancing, reliability, and QoS support.
  5. Strategies, algorithms, and protocols for management of communication resources, including topology discovery, hot update/replacement of components, dynamic reconfigurations, etc.
  6. Performance evaluation and tools for different application areas, including interprocessor communication and I/O, etc.
Results of both theoretical and practical significance will be considered.

PROCEEDINGS:

The proceedings of this workshop will be published together with the proceedings of other IPDPS '04 workshops by the IEEE Computer Society Press.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS:

We are planning a purely web submission and review process. Authors are requested to submit papers (in PDF format) not exceeding 10 single-spaced pages, including abstract, five key words, contact address, figures, and references. Detailed instructions on web submissions will be available soon.

Note: the PDF file must be viewable using the ``acroread'' tool. It is also important, when creating your PDF file, to use a page size of 8.5x11 inches (LETTER sized output not A4), since an A4 sized page may be truncated on a LETTER sized printer.

SCHEDULE:

  
Paper submission:           December 3, 2003 
Notification of acceptance: January  4, 2004 
Camera-ready due:           January 23, 2004

ABSTRACT/PAPER SUBMISSION PAGE IS HERE

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS:

Dhabaleswar K. Panda (Ohio State), Jose Duato (Tech. Univ. of Valencia, Spain), and Craig Stunkel (IBM TJ Watson Research Center)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

PUBLICITY COORDINATORS:

Darius Buntinas (Argonne National Lab) and Nectarios G. Koziris (National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

 For further questions, send e-mail to cac@cse.ohio-state.edu.

Last updated April 22, 2004