UCHPC 2011: Fourth Workshop on UnConventional High Performance Computing

As the word “UnConventional” in the title suggests, the workshop focuses on hardware or platforms used for HPC, which were not intended for HPC in the first place. Reasons could be raw computing power, good performance per watt, or low cost in general. Thus, UCHPC tries to capture solutions for HPC which are unconventional today but perhaps conventional tomorrow. For example, the computing power of platforms for games recently raised rapidly. This motivated the use of GPUs for computing (GPGPU), or even building computational grids from game consoles. The recent trend of integrating GPUs on processor chips seems to be very beneficial for use of both parts for HPC. Other examples for “unconventional” hardware are embedded, low-power processors, upcoming manycore architectures, FPGAs or DSPs. Thus, interesting devices for research in unconventional HPC are not only standard server or desktop systems, but also relative cheap devices due to being mass market products, such as smartphones, netbooks, tablets and small NAS servers. For example, smartphones seem to become more performance hungry every day. Only imagination sets the limit for use of the mentioned devices for HPC. The goal of the workshop is to present latest research in how hardware and software (yet) unconventional for HPC is or can be used to reach goals such as best performance per watt. UCHPC also covers corresponding programming models, compiler techniques, and tools.