Workshop on Many Tasks Computing at SC'08

Ioan Raicu, Yong Zhao, and I are running a Workshop on Many Tasks Computing on Grids and Supercomputers (MTAGS) at SC'08 (Austin, Texas, November 17, 2008). The deadline for submissions is August 15.

Our goal in convening this workshop is to encourage discussion among those interested in escaping the "SPMD rut" that characterizes much work in parallel, if not grid, computing. We believe that new applications and more powerful computers are spurring increased interest in computations involving many separate tasks, loosely or tightly coupled, often linked via a global name/file space. These computations may be no less demanding of computing, file systems, and networks than SPMD computations, but have important differences that may require new tools. Topics of interest include:

Compute resource management
      - Scheduling
      - Job execution frameworks
      - Local resource manager extensions
      - Performance evaluation of resource managers in use on large scale systems
      - Challenges in running many-task workloads on HPC systems

Data Management:
      - Data-Aware Scheduling
      - Shared File System performance and scalability in large deployments
      - Distributed file systems
      - Data caching frameworks and techniques

Large-Scale Workflow Systems
      - Workflow system performance and scalability analysis
      - Scalability of workflow systems
      - Workflow infrastructure and e-Science middleware
      - Programming Paradigms and Models

Large-Scale Many-Task Application
      - Large-scale many-task applications
      - Large-scale many-task data-intensive applications
      - Large-scale high throughput computing (HTC) applications
      - Quasi-supercomputing applications, deployments, and experiences