HiPEAC Mini-Sabbaticals program
HiPEAC has a program of mini-sabbatical visits for HiPEAC faculty members as a part of its overall efforts to maintain a high quality research program and to facilitate research collaborations. We want to stimulate short sabbatical leaves for senior researchers and professors. Mini-sabbatical visits are typical stays for one month or maybe longer at another member company or academic site, or even at a non-HiPEAC institution that is looking to join or collaborate somehow with HiPEAC. The goal of the mini-sabbatical visits is to stimulate collaboration with the aim of coordinating or refocusing the research portfolio of the two institutions involved. The candidate for a sabbatical leave and his/her host, have to prepare a common sabbatical project, including a budget, which has to be approved by the Steering Committee. BSC is in charge of promoting and managing this program. Mini-sabbatical application calls are open all year long. The goal is to have 5 to 10 mini-sabbatical visits per year. Reimbursement is done through a simple per diem rate plus transportation costs.
APPLICATIONS REQUIREMENTS
- The applicant is currently a senior university faculty or academic researcher, active full Member of HiPEAC
- The proposal does justify an existing prior collaboration with the destination institution that
can benefit from the visit, a very promising future join project, or any other consideration.
- The destination institution can be a HiPEAC institution, or even a non-HiPEAC institution that
is looking to join or collaborate somehow with HiPEAC.
- The host institution has to explicitly accept to host the visitor. It should agree which local
researcher who will take care of the guest and that the visitor will have access to means to
achieve the goals of the visit. A budget might be brought under consideration.
- To fill an application form (http://www.hipeac.net/node/add/minisabbatical) is required, describing the research activities to be done. The application form will also include a schedule of the main activities. The
Steering Committee will evaluate the applications and will verify their eligibility.
APPLICATION CALL SCHEDULE
- Mini-sabbatical application calls are open all year long.
- The HiPEAC Steering Committee will periodically evaluate mini-sabbatical applications,
introduced by the mini-sabbatical coordinator.
REIMBURSEMENTS
- Granted money will usually be transferred at once and prior to the mini-sabbatical.
- Expenses could cover: moving expenses, housing, meals, transportation, and research trips.
- The money can be handled as a per diem, and transportation costs can be claimed separately.
Application form: http://www.hipeac.net/node/add/minisabbatical
MINI-SABBATICALS GRANTED DURING 2009-2010:
1) Prof. Dr. Rainer Leupers, from RWTH Aachen University, spent 3 months from April to July, 2009 at ACE Associated Compiler Experts bv, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, hosted by Joseph van Vlijmen, working on parallel compilation for MPSoC, specifically on reconstruction of C code from the compiler IR.
Prof. Leupers role as an expert in Electronic System Level design was to consult on different directions on how to adapt and evolve ACE's flagship product, the CoSy system to the new challenges of multi-core platforms. The major findings of this effort were summarized in a white paper that was delivered to ACE. Among many other by-products of the sabbatical, there was also a joint software demonstration organized at the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco in July 2009. The visit has also allowed consulting on future developments and market perspectives in EDA context.
2) Enrique Torres, assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Systems Engineering Department at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, has been partially funded from this program for his sabbatical leave for study and research at the University of California at Berkeley, USA, at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), collaborating with Professor Krste Asanovic.
They have been working on scalable cache coherence protocols and its related hardware structures in the Parlab and RAMP projects. Parlab is a five-year, $10m, multi-disciplinary research project, exploring the future of parallel processing. Its aim is to productively create efficient and correct software that scales smoothly as the number of core per chip double biennially.
The Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors (RAMP) is a collection of projects from different universities with the common idea of building a infrastructure based on FPGAs to help the development of hardware and software for manycores.
3) Prof. Ed Deprettere, from Leiden University, did a sabbatical at Technical University Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria. March 13 – June 12, 2010, visiting Prof. Marin Marinov and Prof. Angel Popov from Sofia.
The Leiden Embedded Research Center established a new joint education and research embedded systems laboratory at the Technical University Sofia called the Daedalus laboratory. This research laboratory, officially opened on April 7, 2010, will allow some TU-Sofia alumni who have obtained their master or PhD degrees at Leiden University to come back to Bulgaria to continue their research and contribute by educating future TU-Sofia students in the field of advanced embedded systems and software design.
During the sabbatical, Prof. Deprettere offered a 4-week course called “Advanced Design Methods, Techniques, and Tools for Multi-Processor Embedded Systems”. This course will be taught by local teachers and integrated in the education curriculum for Master students at TU-Sofia starting 2011.
4) Prof. Stefano Crespi Reghizzi, from Politecnico di Milano, visited Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Computer Science during most March 2010, invited by Professor David Brooks.
Prof. Crespi's Formal Language and Compiler Group and Prof. Brook's team started collaborating in the summer of 2008 when one of Prof. Crespi's PhD students visited at Harvard to work on the ALARM project.
The main topics discussed during the sabbatical were the automatic parallelization of irregular, large C programs, and the development and support of the ILDJIT research compiler and virtual machine, an ECMA335 compliant dynamic compiler developed by the Formal Languages and Compiler Group of Politecnico di Milano.
5) Sid Touati, from University of Versailles, spent two month on a sabbatical leave at the Technische Universität München and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Science, invited by Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode.
Continuing his work on code performance stability on multi-core architectures, Mr. Touati’s visit to Prof. Bode and his team at the LRZ probed invaluable to understand some of the most important technical problems that are faced by supercomputing centres: energy consumption and cooling.
The research collaboration with TU-Munchen focuses on performance improvement of parallel applications at runtime, and tries to address the challenges of resource sharing in the high performance computing world, where code optimizations have usually assumed the application is running directly on the machine, without other background applications or any influence from the operating system.
Their ongoing collaboration aims to find suitable runtime strategies for thread pinning and migration that can optimize performance and energy consumption
By observing the performance behaviour of an application's threads, and based on dynamic runtime considerations such as machine workload or voltage scaling, the system should decide a suitable thread affinity policy that maximizes performance and minimizes energy consumption.
6) Benjamin Sahelices, from University of Valladolid, Spain, visited the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, hosted by Prof. Josep Torrellas, from September 1 to December 20, 2010.
Previous collaborations between Dr. Sahelices group and Prof. Torrellas began on May 2008, when a member of Dr. Sahelices's research group paid a research visit to Prof. Torellas at UIUC. The resulting work was published in ISCA'09.
While in the i-acoma group, Dr. Sahelices has been working in new chunk execution designs for the new multicore architectures. Chunk execution contributes to reduce the complexity of processor architecture because it eliminates the need to commit instructions in order. The mini-sabbatical working line has been the development of new designs for chunk executions in modern multicore architectures. Some of the challenges have been the interaction with the memory architecture and the exploration of new ways to use the tightly coupled hardware resources to improve multicore chunk execution.
7) Jose Miguel-Alonso, from University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain, has spent his sabbatical at the University of Manchester, UK, hosted by Prof. Ian Watson, from September 30 to December 18, 2010.
Both institutions have maintained a fruitful collaboration since 2002. Dr. Luján, a member of University of Manchester's Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) group has visited the UPV/EHU several times. Prof. Miquel-Alonso has also completed two short stays at the University of Manchester, and one of his former PhD students spent two three-months stays with the APT group.
While at the host institution, Prof. Miguel-Alonso was involved in different research activities within the Advanced Processor Technologies group. He collaborated with the SpiNNaker research project, led by Prof. Furber, in topics related to the interconnection network of the SpiNNaker system, as well as to its fault-tolerance characteristics. As a result, he took active roles in the submission of two research papers:
• “Managing Burstiness and Scalability in Event-Driven Models on the SpiNNaker Neuromimetic System”. Submitted in Oct 2010 to the International Journal of Parallel Programming.
• “Fault Tolerance in the SpiNNaker Architecture”. Submitted in Nov 2010 to IEEE Transactions on Computers.
He also has participated in the meetings and discussions regarding the EU-funded Teraflux project, led by Prof. Watson. His main contributions in these discussions were related to simulation of interconnection infrastructure, and to the mapping and scheduling of parallel program tasks.
Together with Dr. Lujan, he has been studying the scalability of barrier implementations on multi-core systems. A research paper on the topic will be submitted to a forthcoming conference.
8) Ozcan Ozturk, from Bilkent University, Turquei will visit Srimat Chakradhar at the NEC Laboratories in Princeton University, USA, for 3 months, starting January 15, 2011.
Mr. Ozturk goal is to do research on heterogeneous computing clusters, mainly focused on two different aspects. First, parallel programming models and run-times, specifically parallel programming models that allow programmers to specify computation and communication patterns independently of the target architecture. Second, research novel, special-purpose systems such as custom many-core architectures as domain-specific accelerators, with the goal of achieving high-performance at low power consumption on data-intensive applications.