2011 - Wild and Sane Ideas in Speculation and Transactions

Wild and Sane Ideas in Speculation and Transactions
Co-Located with PACT-2011
Galveston Island, Texas, USA
October 10, 2011
As a research community, we have seen transactional memory and other forms of speculative execution ride the wave of the Gartner hype cycle from "next big thing" to the "trough of disillusionment". While these technologies appear to be slowly climbing the "slope of enlightenment", through this workshop, we hope to give them a jolt of encouragement. If best-effort hardware support for speculation and rollback is given (as exemplified by Azul/Transmeta/Sun Rock/AMD ASF), what alternative uses might it have? What new possibilities would emerge if systems supported no-overhead/infinite speculative footprints?

Given such a substrate, what new microarchitectural optimizations are possible? How can various layers of the system stack use such features? What programming abstractions are possible to the developer, beyond transactions? What impact would unbounded speculation have on operating system services, virtualization, debuggers, profilers, I/O, and accelerators?

The workshop will consist of a set of presentations/positions on all things speculative: authors should submit a 2-4 page abstract (details below) summarizing their idea, position, vision, or dream. Supporting these ideas through quantitative evidence is acceptable but not required. In this spirit, we hope to capture the enthusiasm of successful "Wild and Crazy" idea sessions of years past, while keeping the program sane enough that all presentations are subject to serious thought and reflection.

Submission Topics Include

Profligate hardware support for transactions
Speculative programming constructs for single-threaded or parallel performance
New transactional semantics
Unconventional uses of hardware support for speculation
Thread-level speculation and other forms of implicit parallelism
Theoretical models of speculative execution
Interaction of speculation and I/O devices or accelerators
Nested speculation
Profiling and debugging of speculative systems
Interactions with operating systems and virtualization
Reacting and adapting to misspeculation
Speculation in tightly-coupled (e.g. multicore) and loosely coupled (cloud) systems
Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit their ideas in the form of 2-4 page papers, excluding bibliography. To ensure submissions are accessible to a broad audience of researchers in Languages, Compilers, Operating Systems, Architectures, and Run-Time Systems, we ask authors to include a brief background section. Papers will be reviewed for their novelty, ability to cut across areas, and ability to generate discussion.

All paper submissions should be made electronically. The link for submitting papers will appear on this page within a few weeks. Note that there will not be a printed proceedings, nor will accepted abstracts appear in any electronic archival form.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: August 22, 2011 9:00 AM EDT (GMT - 5:00)
Notifications: September 9, 2011
Final Copy Due: September 26, 2011
Workshop: October 10, 2011