We are pleased to announce the Workshop on Managing Overprovisioned Systems (W-MOS) to be held in conjunction with the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) 2014 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Workshop program is now online.

Computer systems are at an inflection point where power budgets are becoming more of a limiting factor on designers than the number of transistors that can be fabricated on a chip. Transistor density continues to grow at geometric rates, but power budgets prevent systems from using all of their transistors simultaneously. As a result, architects have begun to propose overprovisioned designs that contain more hardware than they can utilize simultaneously, including architectures that incorporate fixed-function accelerators, single- and multi-ISA heterogeneous architectures, and “melt the chip” architectures in which each subsystem (cores, memory, and network) can consume the vast majority of the system’s power budget when that subsystem is the bottleneck on application performance.

A common theme among all of these overprovisioned designs is that they transform computer architectures from static designs into dynamic systems that must be continually monitored, reconfigured, and managed in order to deliver maximum performance without exceeding their power budgets. Since the system cannot use all of its hardware simultaneously, some agent (hardware, software, or a combination thereof) must determine which hardware should be used at any given time, depending on the application or applications being run. This will require information from multiple layers of the system stack, including architecture, runtime/OS, and hardware, creating a complex co-design problem that must be solved if computer performance and energy efficiency is to continue to improve at current rates.

The Workshop on Managing Overprovisioned Architectures seeks to bring together researchers from the OS, architecture, and application communities to discuss techniques to configure, monitor, and map applications onto architectures that contain more hardware than they can utilize simultaneously. We are soliciting papers on topics related to these areas, including, but not limited to:

- Power management
- System introspection and adaptation
- Self-aware architectures and runtimes
- Using accelerators for general-purpose programs
- Power-aware scheduling
- Techniques to select the best hardware for an application
- Allocating power to resources based on program needs
- Migrating execution to new resources as requirements change
- Cross-layer communication APIs
- Resilience in overprovisioned systems

Organizers:
Nick Carter (Intel),
Romain Cledat (Intel),
Radu Teodorescu (The Ohio State University),
Josep Torrellas, (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Important dates:
Paper submission: February 3, 2014
Acceptance notification: February 10, 2014
Camera-ready due: February 24, 2014
Workshop date: Saturday, March 1 2014

Submission