The new golden era of concurrency offers a diversity of concurrent architectures to the application programmer -- clusters of symmetric multiprocessors, heterogeneous accelerators (such as the Cell, GPGPUs), large core-count integrated machines (such as the Blue Gene), and multiple levels of parallelism (multithreaded multicores, such the newer Power architectures, or distributed multiprocessors like the Cray MTA).

The central programming challenge for these new architectures is to develop a suitable and robust programming model. The Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model has attracted considerable attention as such a programming model, particularly in the High Performance Computing space. However, widespread acceptance and extension to newer paradigms (e.g. to heteregeneous accelerators and irregular application domains) has been hampered by a focus on homogoneous execution contexts and the Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) threading model.

Several research groups have recently started to investigate asynchronous execution in the PGAS model. Asynchronous execution is the foundation for active message programming, and fine-grained concurrency (e.g. Cilk-style fork-join, OpenMP style teams). It is also the basis for data transfer between non-coherent memories (DMA), remote atomic operations, and in general for techniques for overlapping computation and communication. Finally, asynchronous execution offers a simple model for spawning massive multi-threaded kernel computations on accelerators such as GPUs.

Authors are invited to submit a 10 page paper for consideration for the workshop. We invite papers on all aspects of the PGAS programming model, with particular emphasis on handling asynchronous (multi-threaded) execution (topics enumerated below).

Workshop program

Important dates

Submission deadline	Notification of Acceptance	Final copy due
Extended to April 27, 2009	May 4, 2009	May 25, 2009

Early conference registration ends on May 10, 2009.

Paper submission here. Final papers will be hosted on this website.

Organizing Committee

George Almasi	IBM Research
Calin Cascaval	IBM Research
Vijay Saraswat	IBM Research

Program Committee

George Almasi	IBM Research
Guy Blelloch	CMU
Calin Cascaval	IBM Research
Brad Chamberlain	Cray Inc
Tarek el-Ghazawi	(George Washington U)
Kath Knobe	Intel
James Larus	Microsoft Research
Ewing "Rusty" Lusk	Argonne Nat. Lab
Jan-Willem Maessen	Sun Microsystems
Robert Numrich	U Minnesota
Martin Rinard	MIT
Bratin Saha	Intel
Vijay Saraswat	IBM Research
Lauren Smith	NSA
Marc Snir	U Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kathy Yelick	UC Berkeley

Workshop topics