CALL FOR PAPERS

               Third International Workshop on Software Engineering for 
                       High Performance Computing Applications

                                  Minneapolis, MN
                             Co-located with ICSE 2007
                       http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~SEHPC07

Overview

High performance computing systems are used to develop software for wide variety 
of domains including nuclear physics, crash simulation, satellite data processing, 
fluid dynamics, climate modeling, bioinformatics, and financial modeling. The 
TOP500 website lists the top 500 high performance computing systems along with 
their specifications and owners. The diversity of government, scientific, and 
commercial organizations present on this list illustrates the growing prevalence 
and impact of HPCS applications on modern society.

Recent initiatives in the HPCS community, such as the DARPA High Productivity 
Computing Systems program, recognize that dramatic increases in low-level 
benchmarks of processor speed and memory access times do not necessarily translate 
into high-level increases in actual development productivity. While the machines 
are getting faster, the developer effort required to fully exploit these advances 
can be prohibitive. There is an emerging movement within the HPC community to 
define new ways of measuring high performance computing systems, ways which take 
into account not only the low-level hardware components, but the higher-level 
productivity costs associated with producing usable HPC applications. This movement 
creates anopportunity for the software engineering community to apply our 
techniques and knowledge to a new and important application domain.

Furthermore, the design, implementation, development, and maintenance of HPC 
software systems can differ in significant ways from the systems and development 
processes more typically studied by the software engineering community:

* The requirements often include conformance to sophisticated mathematical
  models. Therefore, the requirements may take the form of an executable
  model in a system such as Matlab, with the implementation involving
  porting to proper platform.

* Often these projects are exploring unknown science making it difficult to
  determine a concrete set of requirements a prioiri.

* The software development process, or "workflow" for HPC application
  development may differ profoundly from traditional software engineering
  processes. For example, one scientific computing workflow, dubbed the
  "lone researcher", involves a single scientist developing a system to
  test a hypothesis. Once the system runs correctly once and returns its
  results, the scientist has no further need of the system. This approach
  contrasts with more typical software engineering lifecycle models, in which
  the useful life of the software is expected to begin, not end, after the
  first correct execution.
* "Usability" in the context of HPCS application development may revolve 
  around optimization to the machine architecture so that computations 
  complete in a reasonable amount of time. The effort and resources involved 
  in such optimization may exceed initial development of the algorithm. 

Submission Instructions

We encourage submission of position papers or statements of interest from members 
of the software engineering or high performance computing system communities.

Position papers of at most five pages will be solicited to address issues including 
but not limited to:

* Case studies of software development processes (workflows) used in HPC
  applications.
* Measures of software development productivity appropriate to HPC
  applications.
* Activity and Purpose-based benchmarks for evaluating existing or proposed 
  HPC architectures
* Software engineering metrics and tool support for HPC applications.
* The design of empirical studies to better understand the environment, 
  tools, languages, and processes used in HPC application development and 
  how they might be improved. 

The organizing committee hopes for participation from a broad range of stakeholders 
from across the software engineering, HPC, and grid computing communities. Accepted 
position papers will be posted on the workshop website 
(http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~SE-HPC07).

Please observe the following:
1. Position papers should be at most 5 pages.  
2. Format your paper according to the ICSE 2007 technical paper guidelines
   at http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/icse07/index.php?id=69
3. Submit your paper in PDF format to SEHPC07@cse.msstate.edu

4. Deadline for submission: January 20, 2007.
5. Submission notification: Febrary 20, 2007.


Program Committee:

Jeffrey Carver                Stuart Faulk               
Mississippi State University  University of Oregon       
carver at cse.msstate.edu     faulk at cs.uoregon.edu       

Philip Johnson                Jeremy Kepner
University of Hawaii          MIT Lincoln Laboratory
johnson at hawaii.edu         kepner at mit.edu

Adam Porter		      Douglass Post          
University of Maryland        DoD HPC Modernization Office 
aporter at cs.umd.edu         post at lanl.go		

Walter Tichy                  Lawrence Votta
University of Karlsruhe       SUN Microsystems
tichy at ira.uka.de           lawrence.votta at sun.com