The Technical Committee of Architecture for Highly Integrated Circuits of German GI & ITG in conjunction with ARCS 2007 March 12-15, Zürich (Switzerland) http://arcs07.ethz.ch/ Workshop

Introduction

Reconfigurable processing elements, whether used stand-alone or in conjunction with a general-purpose processor as part of an adaptive computer, have proven quite capable of providing high computational performance. By matching the processor structure to the needs of the current computation, this performance can be achieved at a much lower power consumption than with an equivalent general-purpose processor alone, and without incurring the tremendous mask and fabrication costs of a dedicated ASIC. Additional challenges, such as fault-tolerance and self-adaptation to changing environments, can also be met sucessfully using the technique of reconfiguration. It has thus been deemed the most important trend in computer and system architecture by the joint ITG/GI technical committee on the Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS).

However, the granularity of the configuration process itself can vary between different solutions. It can occur just once, as in the case of a configurable processor whose instruction set is adapted to a specific problem domain, to occasionally, such as switching between different applications in a single system, up to dynamically, quickly altering the configuration even within a single application.

The focus of the very succesful past three Workshops on Dynamically Reconfigurable Systems (DRS) has traditionally just been the latter scenario. However, even the coarser-grained (re)configurations described above have been demonstrated as very useful in practice. Thus, for the first time, DRS is widening its scope to also address the entire spectrum of (re)configuration granularity.

We thus invite contributions dealing with problems posed by (re)configurable systems in areas such as architecture, tools, runtime systems, and middleware. Furthermore, even evaluations of applications relying on (re)configurability for their operation (and not just for prototyping!) could be suitable material. Since the entire field is still a dynamic one, do not hesitate to submit relevant work not covered by the above examples.

Workshop Topics

• Architectures of DRS and DRS components
• Programming and processing models
• Design and verification tools
• Operating system support
• Applications requiring (re)configurability

Deadlines

Submission of papers

Formating Guidelines

• A detailed instruction for typesetting the manuscript.
• A Word template.
• A LaTeX document class.

Organization

Workshop Chairs

Program Committee