Call for Special Session Papers: SAMOS XIII - Deadline approaching: April 12

SAMOS XIII - Call for Special Sessions Papers

2013 International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems:
Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation (SAMOS XIII)
Samos, Greece, July 15-18, 2013

http://www.samos-conference.com
===========================================================

*** SUBMISSION DEADLINE : April 12, 2013 ***

Three special sessions are organized in SAMOS XIII. Technical submissions are invited
on the following special sessions:

1. Fault-Tolerant Techniques for Computer Systems, Architectures and Processors.
2. Exposed Data Path Architectures: Recent Advances and Applications.
3. Embedded Medical Systems: The Low-Power and Fault-Tolerance Dilemma.

SAMOS is a unique conference. It deals with embedded systems (sort of) but that
is not what makes it different. It brings together every year researchers from both
academia and industry on the quiet and inspiring northern mountainside of the
Mediterranean island of Samos, which in itself is different. But more importantly, it
really fosters collaboration rather than competition. Formal and intensive technical
sessions are only held in the mornings. A lively panel ends the formal part of the day,
and leads nicely into the afternoons and evenings -- reserved for informal discussions,
good food, and the inviting Aegean Sea. SAMOS has IEEE technical co-sponsorship
by the IEEE CAS Society and the IEEE SSCS Germany Chapter. The conference
proceedings, including the special sessions, will be published in the IEEE Xplore
Database.

The conference keynotes are given by leaders in the field. This year's keynotes will be
given by Wen-mei W. Hwu, Prof. at Univ. Illinois, Urbana, US, AndrA(c) Seznec, Prof. at
ALF - INRIA IRISA, FR, and AndrA!s Vajda, Expert on Cloud Architecture at Ericsson, SE.

Technical submissions are invited on original work in one of the following special sessions:

SAMOS Special Session 1:
**"Fault-Tolerant Techniques for Computer Systems, Architectures and Processors"**

Session Chair:
Ioannis Sourdis, Chalmers University of Technology, SE

As semiconductor technology scales, chips are becoming ever less reliable; prominent
reasons for this phenomenon are the sheer number of transistors on a given silicon area
and their shrinking device features. As a consequence, reliability is an increasing concern
not only for safety-critical systems, but also for many other application domains in
Embedded systems. However, traditional solutions for fault tolerance, e.g. provided through
various redundancy schemes, have disproportionally increasing power and performance
costs. This, in turn, limits substantially systems efficiency, especially due to the fact that
performance scaling and power are becoming significant design challenges, too. In the face
of such changes in the technological landscape, this special session seeks original
contributions for fault-tolerant computer systems, architectures and processors, which
address the above challenges. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• fault-tolerant architectures and micro-architectures;
• fault-tolerant application-specific and domain-specific systems and Systems-on-Chip;
• fault-tolerant Reconfigurable systems;
• fault-tolerant memory management;
• fault-tolerant Network-on-Chip interconnects;
• fault-tolerant runtime system management.

SAMOS Special Session 2:
**Exposed Data Path Architectures: Recent Advances and Applications**

Session Chairs:
Pekka JA$?A$?skelA$?inen, Tampere University of Technology, FI
Jani Boutellier, University of Oulu, FI

The concept of aEUoeexposed data pathaEU' is used in conjunction with processor architectures where
the programmer can control more details of the data path than in aEUoetraditionalaEU processor
architectures. For example, transport triggered architectures expose the data transports between
the register files and function units for the direct control of the programmer and some
commercial GPU architectures such as the AMD r600-family, while otherwise having a general
purpose register based instruction-set, allow the programmer to explicitly route previously
computed results from a function unit to the next one to implement register bypassing in software.
The additional data path visibility extends the programmer freedom, simplifies the control logic,
enables customization of the data path interconnection network, and increases the instruction-level
parallelism scalability, with the obvious drawbacks of wider instruction words and added compilation
complexity.

This special session is for presenting recent novel work related to exposed data path processors.
Submission of position papers and state-of-the-art reviews is also encouraged. We welcome
contributions including, but not limited to,

• different exposed data path architecture variants;
• efficient compilation techniques;
• customization aspects;
• instruction encoding/compression techniques;
• application design cases that beneficially utilize processors with exposed data paths.

SAMOS Special Session 3:
**"Embedded Medical Systems: The Low-Power and Fault-Tolerance Dilemma"**

Session Chair:
Christos Strydis, Erasmus Medical Center, NL

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of embedded, medical systems. Such systems already
span a wide range of applications, from monitoring devices such as the portable ambulatory EKG to
intervention devices such as the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator. While low power
consumption and small size have been traditional design objectives, such devices are showing trends
of growing design complexity and pervasive use in modern societies. Combined with the fact that
transistor technologies are shrinking and becoming more error-prone, a design objective that is rapidly
gaining significance in embedded medical systems is reliability. In this venture, widely known reliability
techniques from the high-performance computing field cannot be adopted as is, since embedded
medical systems are severely constrained in their energy budget. In this context, this special session
strives to expose cutting-edge developments in a field of embedded systems where low power
consumption and fault tolerance are of equal importance. Various topics of interest include
(but are not limited to):

• (Ultra) Low-power (U-LP) and fault-tolerant system and processor architectures;
• New programming paradigms and compiler-side optimization techniques for fault tolerance and low power;
• Efficient mapping of high-performance, medical applications on low-power platforms;
• Low-power, small-footprint and/or reliable interconnects;
• Body-Area Networks (BANs): devices and protocols;
• Medical-system security;
• New medical standards; design for modularity and reuse;
• Smart (bio)sensors and (bio)actuators.

** Samos Panel **
The panel ending each day, coordinated by Yale Patt, Univ. Texas - Austin, and
Trevor Mudge, Univ. Michigan, focuses on identifying critical problems and opportunities
provided by the emerging multi-core era of the microprocessor, and often digs deeper
into topics presented during the morning session.

** Travel Grants **
SAMOS will provide 10 travel grants (300 euros). Applicable authors are students from
Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain and authors without support from their organisation.

SAMOS XII Organization:

General Chair
O. SilvA(c)n, Univ. Oulu, FI

Program Chair
H. Jeschke, Univ. Hannover, DE

Track Chairs
Track: "The Applications, Systems, Architectures, and Processors"
A. Moshovos, Univ. Toronto, CA
R. Woods, QueenaEU(tm)s Univ. Belfast, UK
Track: The Modeling, Design, and Design Space Exploration
H. Flatt, Fraunhofer Institute, DE
C. Galuzzi, TU Delft, NL

SAMOS Steering Committee
S. Bhattacharyya, Univ. Maryland aEU" College Park, US
H. Blume, Univ. Hannover, DE
E. Deprettere, Leiden University, NL
N. Dimopoulos, Univ. Victoria, CA
G.N. Gaydadjiev, Chalmers Univ. Tech., SE
J. Glossner, Optimum Semiconductor, US
W. Najjar, Univ. California - Riverside, US
A.D. Pimentel, Univ. Amsterdam, NL
O. SilvA(c)n, Univ. Oulu, FI
J. Takala, Tampere Univ. Tech., FI
S. Wong, TU Delft, NL

Past Chair
J. McAllister, QueenaEU(tm)s University Belfast, UK

Program Committee: See http://www.samos-conference.com

===========================================================
Important Dates:

April 12, 2013 -- Submission Deadline for special session papers
May 6, 2013 -- Notification of Acceptance for special session papers
May 24, 2013 -- Camera Ready Submission Deadline for special session papers
July 15 - 18, 2013 -- SAMOS XIII, Greece