ROME 2016 - 4th Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for the Many-core Era

Since the beginning of the multicore era, parallel processing has become prevalent across the board. However, in order to continue a performance increase according to Moore’s Law, a next step needs to be taken: away from common multicores towards innovative many-core architectures. Such systems, equipped with a significant higher amount of cores per chip than multicores, pose challenges in both hardware and software design. On the hardware side, complex on-chip networks, scratchpads, hybrid memory cubes, non-volatile memory and stacked memory, as well as deep cache-hierarchies and novel cache-coherence strategies will enrich the current research areas in the future.
However, the ROME workshop focuses on the software side because without complying system software, runtime and operating system support, all these new hardware facilities cannot be exploited. Hence, the new challenges in hardware/software co-design are to step beyond traditional approaches and to wage new programming models and operating system designs in order to exploit the theoretically available performance of future hardware as effectively and power-aware as possible.
The focus of the ROME workshop stands in the tradition of a successful series of events originally hosted by the Many-core Applications Research Community (MARC). Prior MARC Symposia took place at ONERA research center in Toulouse, at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam and at the RWTH Aachen University. Starting in 2013, the organizers continued this series by establishing ROME as one of the co-located workshops of the Euro-Par as the prime European conference for parallel and distributed computing.
While the 1st ROME workshop, which was hosted at the Euro-Par 2013 in Aachen, was still a MARC-related follow-up event but for a broader audience, the 2nd ROME workshop, held in conjunction with the Euro-Par 2014 in Porto, already expanded its focus to research questions arising from a dawning many-core dominated exascale era.
In 2015, this broader focus was essentially retained for the 3rd ROME workshop, which was held in conjunction with Euro-Par 2015 in Vienna, but the relevance of runtime and operating system aspects was stressed once again as being the primary scope of the ROME workshop series.
Topics
This year, too, authors from all related disciplines are invited to submit unpublished papers regarding software for novel many-core hardware architectures. The call for papers especially emphasizes on the challenges and research questions arising from the upcoming generation of heterogeneous and/or massive parallel systems stepping towards a many-core dominated exascale era. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
New approaches for operating systems on novel many-core architectures
Operating system extensions for addressing many-core related issues
Many-core aware runtime support for large-scale applications
Bare-metal programming and system software for many-cores
Dealing with legacy software on novel many-core architectures
Virtualization solutions to deal with hardware limitations on many-cores
Support for interactivity with and between many-core applications
Message-passing interfaces and middleware for many-core systems
Heterogeneity- and/or hierarchy-aware many-core middleware
Concepts and methods for exploiting deep memory hierarchies
Operating system extensions for non-volatile memory support
Software stacks for new concepts of compute acceleration on many-cores
Interfaces for performance and power analysis on many-core systems
Runtime support for power-aware many-core computing