September 20-25, 2015
University Residential Center
Bertinoro (Forlì-Cesena), Italy

ScalPerf aims at taking an integrated look at the opportunities and constraints on the road to ever higher performance and productivity of computing systems. Distinguished researchers are invited to exchange their perspectives on different areas that can contribute to scalable computing.

The workshop will include invited talks and discussion sessions. The talks can cover established results as well as brain storm on future research directions. The discussion sessions are two, each consisting of a first part to sharpen the formulation of the issues and a second part to explore answers. This year, the topic of discussion is

High performance scientific and cognitive computing

Background: In traditional scientific computing, established mathematical models are used to study specific scenarios. In cognitive computing, particularly in machine learning, the main goal is often the extraction (or tuning) of models from the data. This approach, for a variety of advancements in the information technology field, has begun to yield valuable fruits in many areas.

The workshop will focus on commonalities and differences between scientific and cognitive computing. Algorithmically, graphs and sparse linear algebra appear to provide a significant common factor and possibly an avenue to separate the specification of the computation from the optimization of its performance. Architecturally, accelerators are becoming crucial to HPC solutions; it will be interesting to investigate whether cognitive computing and scientific computing can benefit from the same accelerating engines or there is opportunity/necessity for differentiation.

Participants will be invited to submit suggestions for specific issues to include in the discussion a few weeks before the workshop.

In addition to the invited speakers, participation of other interested researchers, particularly graduate students and junior researchers, is welcome. An expression of interest can be sent to bilardi@bici.eu, including a brief CV.