==============================
                     SC12 Call for Technical Papers
                     ==============================

                        November 10 - 16, 2012
                         Salt Lake City, Utah
       Abstracts due April 20, 2012; full papers due April 27, 2012
              http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/papers

SC12, the premier annual international conference on high performance
computing, networking, and storage, will be held in Salt Lake City,
Utah, November 10-16, 2012. The Technical Papers Program at SC is the
leading venue for presenting the highest-quality original research, from
the foundations of HPC to its emerging frontiers. The conference
committee solicits submissions of excellent scientific merit that
introduce new ideas to the field and stimulate future trends on topics
such as applications, systems, parallel algorithms, and performance
modeling. SC also welcomes submissions that make significant
contributions to the "state of practice" by providing compelling
insights on best practices for provisioning, using, and enhancing high
performance computing systems, services, and facilities.


New in 2012
===========
 - Reorganized and new topic areas
 - "State of Practice" track integrated with regular papers
 - Later deadlines (end of April)
 - Review rebuttal period


Technical Paper Topic Areas
===========================
Submissions will be considered on any topic related to high performance
computing including, but not limited to, the nine topical areas below.

1.   Algorithms
2.   Applications
3.   Architectures and Networks
4.   Clouds and Grids
5.   Performance, Energy, and Dependability
6.   Programming Systems
7.   Storage, Visualization, and Analytics
8.   System Software
9.   State of Practice

** Algorithms

Concerns the development, evaluation and optimization of scalable, high
performance algorithms for problems that are typically common to
multiple disciplines. Topics include:

 - Data assimilation, model refinement, and reduced-order models
 - Discrete and combinatorial problems
 - Grid and mesh-based methods
 - Inverse problems
 - Numerical methods, linear and non-linear systems
 - Particle, N-body, and molecular/coarse-grained methods
 - Uncertainty quantification

** Applications

Concerns the development and enhancement of algorithms, models,
software, and problem solving environments for domain-specific
applications that require high performance computing, networking, and
storage. Topics include:

 - Bioinformatics and computational biology
 - Computational earth and atmospheric sciences
 - Computational materials science and engineering
 - Computational astronomy, chemistry, fluid dynamics, physics, mechanics, etc.
 - Computation and data enabled social science
 - Computational design optimization for aerospace, energy, 
   manufacturing, and industrial applications
 - Computational medicine and bioengineering

** Architecture and Networks

Concerns all aspects of high performance hardware including the
optimization and evaluation of processors and networks. Topics include:

 - Processor architecture, chip multiprocessors, GPUs, cache, and memory 
   subsystems 
 - Interconnect technologies (InfiniBand, Myrinet, Quadrics, Ethernet, 
   Routable PCI etc.), switch/router architecture, network topologies, 
   on-chip or optical networks, and network fault tolerance 
 - Internet protocol (TCP, UDP, sockets), quality of service, congestion 
   management, and collective communication 
 - Power-efficient architectures, high-availability architectures, 
   stream or vector architectures, embedded and reconfigurable 
   architectures, and emerging technologies 
 - Innovative hardware/software co-design
 - Parallel and scalable system architectures
 - Performance evaluation and measurement of real systems

** Clouds and Grids

Concerns all aspects of grids and clouds. Topics include:

 - Security and identity management
 - Virtualization and overlays
 - Scheduling, load balancing, workflows, and resource provisioning
 - Data management and scientific applications
 - Self-configuration, management, information services, and monitoring
 - Compute and storage cloud architectures
 - Programming models and tools for computing on clouds and grids
 - Quality of service and service-level agreement management
 - Problem solving environments and portals
 - Service-oriented architectures and tools for integration of clouds, 
   clusters, and grids

** Performance, Energy, Dependability

Concerns the crosscutting subjects of performance, energy, and
dependability (PED) that typically span multiple areas of expertise and
are crucial factors in the design of scalable HPC systems. Topics
include:

 - Analysis, modeling, or simulation for PED
 - Empirical measurement of PED on real-world systems
 - Tools, code instrumentation, and instrumentation infrastructure 
   for measurement and monitoring of PED
 - New opportunities or challenges for PED made possible by emerging 
   HPC technologies
 - PED workload characterization and benchmarking
 - PED studies of HPC subsystems, such as processor, network, memory, 
   and I/O
 - Impact of PED on applications and their design
 - Impact of application design on PED
 - Methodologies and formalisms for PED

** Programming Systems

Concerns technologies that support parallel programming for large-scale
systems as well as smaller-scale components that will plausibly serve as
building blocks for next-generation HPC architectures. Topics include:

 - Compiler analysis and optimization; program transformation
 - Parallel programming languages and notations; programming models
 - Runtime systems
 - Libraries (in support of end users or other aspects of the 
   programming environment)
 - Parallel application frameworks
 - Tools (e.g., debuggers, performance analysis, integrated development 
   environments, data analysis, visualization)
 - Software engineering for parallel programming
 - Productivity-oriented programming environments and studies
 - Solutions for parallel programming challenges: interoperability, 
   memory consistency, determinism, race detection, work stealing, load 
   balancing, etc.

** Storage, Visualization, and Analytics

Concerns all aspects of storage, visualization, and analysis. Topics
include:

 - Databases for HPC, scalable structured storage
 - Data mining, analysis, and visualization for modeling and simulation
 - Parallel file, storage, and archival systems
 - Scalable storage, metadata, and data management
 - I/O performance tuning, benchmarking, and middleware
 - Next generation storage systems and media
 - Storage systems for data intensive computing
 - Storage networks
 - Reliability and fault tolerance in HPC storage
 - Visualization and image processing

** System Software

Concerns the design and development of operating systems, runtime
systems, and other low- level software that enables allocation and
management of hardware resources for high performance computing
applications and services. Topics include:

 - Alternative and specialized operating systems and runtime systems 
   for many-core processors
 - Support for fault tolerance and resilience
 - Management of complex memory hierarchies and transactional memory
 - Enhancements for attached and integrated accelerators
 - Distributed memory and shared memory systems
 - Communication optimization
 - Interactions between the OS, runtime, compiler, middleware, and tools
 - Strategies for managing and reducing energy consumption
 - Virtualization and virtual machines
 - Approaches for enabling adaptive and introspective system software

** State of Practice

Concerns all aspects related to the pragmatic practices of HPC,
including infrastructure, services, facilities, large-scale application
executions, etc. Submissions that develop best practices, optimized
designs, or benchmarks are of particular interest. Although concrete
case studies within a conceptual framework would likely serve as the
basis for submitted papers, efforts to generalize the experience for
wider applicability will be highly valued. Topics include:

 - Deployment experiences of large-scale infrastructures and facilities
 - Long-term infrastructural management experiences
 - Comparative benchmarks of actual machines over a wide spectrum of 
   workloads
 - Pragmatic resource management strategies and experiences
 - Facilitation of "big data" associated with supercomputing
 - User support experiences with large-scale and novel machines
 - Multi-center infrastructures and their management
 - Pragmatic bridging of cloud data centers and supercomputing centers
 - Education, training, and dissemination activities and their 
   quantitative results
 - Procurement, technology investment, and acquisition of best practices
 - Infrastructural policy issues, especially international experiences


Review Process
==============
The SC12 Technical Papers Committee will rigorously review all
submissions with the goal of selecting the best technical contributions
across both established and emerging areas of HPC. In an effort to
enhance the review process and to create an exceptional program, SC12
will introduce a review rebuttal option for the authors. The review
process acceptance criteria will concentrate on originality, technical
soundness, presentation quality, timeliness, impact, and relevance to
SC. Some papers may present principles, results, and discussions in the
context of a single node, core, thread, or GPU. To be accepted, these
papers must measurably improve upon the state of the art along
dimensions that are relevant for SC.

Awards will be presented for Best Paper and Best Student Paper. Extended
versions of papers selected as finalists for the Best Paper and Best
Student Paper Awards may be published in the journal Scientific
Programming. With our focus on quality and the observed trend towards
substantial increases in submissions from year to year, the committee
expects a 20% acceptance rate for SC12 Technical Papers.


** How to submit

SC follows a two-part submission process, with abstracts due by April
20, 2012 and full papers by April 27, 2012. Abstracts and papers must be
submitted electronically via the website
https://submissions.supercomputing.org/. A sample submission form is
also available at that site (click on the tab "Sample Submission Forms"
at the login page).

Format: Submissions are limited to 10 pages in the IEEE format (see
http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.
html ) The 10-page limit includes figures, tables, and appendices, but
does not include references, for which there is no page limit.

Selecting areas of contribution: All submissions must indicate one of
the nine areas as the primary area of contribution. One of the remaining
eight areas may be indicated as a secondary area of contribution.

Dual Submission: Submission material cannot overlap substantially with
any paper previously accepted for publication or under review by any
conference or journal during the SC review process. Authors should
follow IEEE publication policies (see
http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/Multi_Sub_Guidelines_Intro.html).


Important SC12 Information
==========================
Location       : Utah Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Information    : http://sc12.supercomputing.org/
Web Submissions: https://submissions.supercomputing.org/
Email Contact  : papers@info.supercomputing.org

** Important Dates

Submissions Open: February 15, 2012
Abstracts Due   : April 20, 2012 (Abstracts are required in order to 
                                  submit a full paper.)
Full Papers Due : April 27, 2012
Review Rebuttal : June 15--19, 2012
Notifications   : July 15, 2012
Conference Dates: November 10-16, 2012


SC12 Technical Papers Committee
===============================

** SC12 Technical Papers Chairs

Padma Raghavan, The Pennsylvania State University
Jeffrey S. Vetter,  Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

** SC12 Technical Papers Areas Chairs

Algorithms                       : Edmond Chow, Georgia Tech
Applications                     : Martin Berzins, University of Utah
Architecture and Networks        : Steve Keckler, NVIDIA and The University 
                                   of Texas at Austin
Clouds and Grids                 : Marty Humphrey, University of Virginia
Performance, Power, Dependability: David Lowenthal, University of Arizona
Programming Systems              : Brad Chamberlain, Cray Inc.
Storage, Visualization, Analytics: Hank Childs, Lawrence Berkeley National 
                                   Laboratory
System Software                  : Ron Brightwell, Sandia National 
                                   Laboratories
State of Practice                : Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo Institute 
                                   of Technology

The complete list of members of the technical papers committee is
available online at http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/committees.