Programming for the Large 2018

Cancelled: Unfortunately, Programming for the Large is canceled for 2018

In the last decade we have witnessed a new kid on the block in the programming (language) community: programming “large computers”. Such computers include many-core machines, clusters of raspberry-pies, industry-scale cluster machines, cloud infrastructure, CUDA and MPI-based supercomputers, etc.

Even though such computer systems have been around for many years, our community has largely neglected them. HPC was for physicists or meteorologists running experiments on supercomputers. Cluster computing and programming data centres was the business of Amazon, Google or Facebook.

However, times are changing as the hardware that defines this field of the computational spectrum is becoming cheaper and cheaper. Any university lab or medium-sized enterprise can easily afford to buy its own ‘mini cluster’ for a few thousand euros. The volume occupied by a machine consisting of a few hundreds of cores is gradually reaching office dimensions. Additionally, the decreasing price of cloud computing infrastructure makes this kind of hardware even more attainable for small and medium-sized enterprises.

At the same time, the kind of applications running on such hardware have gone through a democratisation process. Cluster computing frameworks used to be specialist tools with a strong focus on scientific computing. However, with the advent of mobile devices and/or sensors that perpetually upload data and the accessibility to cheap storage, even medium-sized companies can benefit from a cluster computing infrastructure to process all of that data. This has radically changed and broadened the application domains that these frameworks are required to cover. In other words, programming hundreds or thousands of cores has become the problem of the everyday life programmer.

Call for Papers

This workshop seeks to gather researchers that contribute to the simplification of the software stack that will be used to program such machinery in the near future. The main focus of the workshop is “Programming for the Large”. Nonetheless, this workshop aims to bring together researchers from many disciplines: distributed programming, big data processing, distributed database engineering, etc. This workshop welcomes any contribution that advances the state-of-the-art in the design, implementation and engineering of runtime systems for cluster architectures.

Topics of Interest

We solicit contributions related to topics that may include but are not restricted to:

• PGAS languages, HPC languages, DSLs for HPC.
• Big Data processing frameworks
• Programming language design for HPC computing
• Distributed runtime engineering: garbage collection, scheduling, etc.
• Tool support for distributed runtimes: IDEs, debuggers, etc.
• Formal verification of distributed program properties
• Applications and case studies or empirical research that evaluates the state-of-the-art
• Patterns and best-practices

Workshop Format and Submissions

The workshop welcomes two main kinds of contributions:

• Mature contributions: full papers of up to 10 pages presenting new previously unpublished research in one or more of the topics identified above. They will be published on the ACM Digital Library as an official ACM SIGPLAN publication.

• Position papers and work-in-progress contributions: short papers of up to 5 pages introducing a contribution (an idea, a viewpoint, an argument, work in progress…) which may be in its initial stage and not fully developed but which is worth being presented given its relevance to the topics, to trigger discussions and interactions. They will be included in the informal proceedings on the website.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: 26 January 2018
• Full paper submission: 2 February 2018
• Position paper and work-in-progress paper submission: 13 February 2018
• Author notification: 23 February 2018

Author Instructions

Submissions should use the ACM Conference acmart Format with the sigconf option with a font size of 10 point and the font family Times New Roman. All submissions should be in PDF format. If you use LaTeX or Word, please use the provided ACM acmart templates. Otherwise, please follow the ACM author instructions.

If you are formatting your paper using LaTeX, you will need to set the 10pt option in the \documentclass command. If you are formatting your paper using Word, you may wish to use the provided Word template that supports this font size. Please include page numbers in your submission for review using the LaTeX command \settopmatter{printfolios=true} (see examples in template).

Please also ensure that your submission is legible when printed on a black and white printer. In particular, please check that colors remain distinct and font sizes are legible.

Authors are invited to submit their papers in PDF using the submission system at https://soft.vub.ac.be/pftl18.