PRISM2

Welcome to the 2nd annual workshop on parallelism in mobile platforms (PRISM-2)!

Mobile platforms are an increasingly important computing environment for many people and businesses. It is both historic and symbolic that PCs were outsold by smartphones in 2011. Rapid advances in wireless network technology like 4G LTE and multicore based mobile architectures continue to fuel the development of exciting new applications on mobile platforms, which, in turn, attract elevated attention to the mobile platforms. While performance and power are two most critical design goals for computing platforms across the board today, mobile platforms are perhaps the most sensitive to the right balancing of the two design goals due to their battery powered nature. Furthermore, mobile platforms are subject to other unique design constraints like: very limited form-factor, no active cooling, and constantly changing external environment. Typically, environment changes are continuously "sensed" for contextualizing a given system. One of the most important principles in designing today's computing systems is to exploit parallelism. Mobile platforms are no exception and we find increasingly more instances of the use of parallelism in them. At the hardware level, there are: multiple processor cores, GPGPU, accelerators, multiple banks of memory, multiple channels to non-volatile memory chips, and multiple radios, to name a few. At the software level, parallel and concurrent threading techniques are commonly employed to improve responsiveness and throughput in the OS and applications alike. We anticipate that future mobile platforms will make more extensive and creative use of parallelism. This workshop focuses on how parallelism is, and can be, utilized in hardware, software and their interaction in order to improve the user experiences with mobile platforms.

This workshop focuses on how parallelism is, and can be, utilized in hardware, software and their interaction in order to improve the user experiences with mobile platforms. Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

- Emerging parallel application processor architectures and hardware features in mobile platforms;
- Compelling future applications on mobile platforms that call for unprecedented parallelism;
- Mobile GPGPU architectures and programming models;
- Hardware accelerators for mobile applications;
- Storage architectures in mobile platforms;
- Radio and networking architectures in mobile platforms;
- Compiler support for parallel mobile platforms;
- OS support to accommodate and promote parallelism in mobile platforms;
- Experiences in parallel mobile applications development;
- Novel techniques to improve responsiveness by exploiting parallelism;
- Novel techniques to improve performance/energy by exploiting parallelism;
- Mobile platform performance evaluation methodologies;
- Application benchmarks for mobile platforms;
- Characterization of emerging workloads on mobile platforms; and
- Impact and interaction of emerging technologies to mobile platforms

The workshop aims at providing a forum for researchers, engineers and students from academia and industry to discuss their latest research in designing mobile platforms and systems, to bring their ideas and research problems to the attention of others, and to obtain valuable and instant feedback from fellow researchers.