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ANNOUNCEMENT & CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

THE PETAFLOPS FRONTIER WORKSHOP 

February 6, 1995
at the 1995 Conference on the
Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation sponsored by  the IEEE
Washington, DC - McLean Hilton

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A Petaflops is a measure of computer performance equal to a million 
billion floating point operations per second and is more powerful 
than all the computers on the Internet combined.

A one day workshop is being held to explore this extreme regime of 
computing performance from the perspective of systems technology 
and applications requirements.

ORGANIZED BY: 
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Thomas Sterling, USRA CESDIS  and 
John Dorband, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Michele OÕConnell, USRA CESDIS

GOALS:
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 1)  To identify the array of opportunities for machine architecture and 
implementation technology that could lead to computing on the scale 
of a petaflops.

2)  To reveal the nature and requirements of applications/algorithms 
that would be enabled by such processing capability. 


APPROACH
==========
THE PETAFLOPS FRONTIER workshop is being organized to 
provide a formal context in which diverse ideas may be presented by 
scientists and engineers across a broad range of disciplines. It is 
intended that an eclectic ensemble of concepts and views be 
represented so that all opportunities of credible potential to the future 
of petaflops systems architecture and usage be included.  The 
sponsors of THE PETAFLOPS FRONTIER workshop are issuing a 
call for abstracts to encourage and attract the richest participation 
from among all relevant fields and interested communities. 
Presentations will be selected from among these abstracts but all 
qualified abstracts will be published as part of the workshop 
proceedings along with a summary and analysis of the workshop 
findings.  This workshop is in response to the key recommendations 
from the Pasadena workshop on Enabling Technologies for 
Peta(FL)OPS Computing held in February, 1994 and is intended to 
extend its findings.


Agenda
======
The agenda of THE PETAFLOPS FRONTIER workshop is structured 
to establish requirements and opportunities. The morning session is 
dedicated to Applications and Software, and is intended to identify a 
wide array of application problems and programs that can scale to 
and exploit the power of petaflops computers. Examining these 
problems should provide insight concerning the balance of 
resources required to perform them. Additionally, critical issues of 
software support will be considered as they uniquely relate to the 
management of petaflops scale computing systems. The afternoon 
session is dedicated to Device Technology and System Structures to 
identify possible ways of increasing clock rate, bandwidths, capacity, 
and parallelism. Architectures are not limited to general purpose 
digital systems but may include special purpose structures or 
analog/hybrid paradigms. The final hour of the program will be 
dedicated to general discussion on all relevant topics and 
perspectives.

Call for Abstracts
==================
Extended abstracts are solicited for participation in THE 
PETAFLOPS FRONTIER workshop. Abstracts should be 1500 words 
or less. In addition, one or two optional graphs/charts/images may be 
included (to be published at the discretion of the editors). 
Contributions from the fields of device technology and systems 
architecture are encouraged from but not limited to areas of: 
semiconductor, optical,  superconductivity, computing paradigms, 
parallel structures, molecular computing, neural nets, analog 
computing, cellular automata, dataflow, communications, and mass 
storage.  Contributions from the fields of parallel applications and 
algorithms should report impact of Petaflops on application domain, 
scaling properties, and computing resources requirements (e.g. 
memory, bandwidth, mass storage).  Abstracts may report results of 
relevant work, extrapolations and analyses from known conditions to 
petaflops scale, potential capabilities of future methods/ 
technologies, or concepts and position statements related to the 
challenge of achieving petaflops capability.  Where possible, 
quantitative estimates are requested as they will strengthen the 
presentation.  Both conservative and visionary viewpoints are being 
sought.  Electronic submission is encouraged in textual, TeX 
(LaTeX), or Postscript forms.

Submissions
===========
Electronic submissions are encouraged in textual, tex (latex), or 
postscript forms.  ABSTRACTS ARE DUE ON OR BEFORE 
JANUARY 6, 1995 and authors will be notified on January 20th of 
presentation status.  Your contributions, directly or indirectly, are 
greatly valued.  Please note that abstracts will be accepted, posted, 
and published even by those contributors unable to participate at the 
workshop in person.  

For Submissions, registration information and more contact:

michele@usra.edu

Michele O'Connell / USRA CESDIS
Code 930.5
Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20771
301-286-4403
fax: 301-286-1777

Questions may be directed to the above or to Dr. John Dorband 
(301) 286-9419 or dorband@nibbles.gsfc.nasa.gov 

Participation is limited - presenters will be invited from among the 
authorship of submitted abstracts, attendance is on a space 
available basis.