Keynote Speakers

ARCS 2015 is honoured to have in the program three distinguished speakers which will open each day of the main conference:

Wednesday, March 25
Auditorium, 13:40 - 14:40

The evolution of computer architectures: a view from the European Commission

Dr. Sandro D'Elia, European Commission Unit "Complex Systems & Advanced Computing"

Abstract of talk: the changes in technology and market conditions have brought, in recent years, a significant evolution in the computer architectures. Multi-core chips force programmers to think parallel in any application domain, heterogeneous systems integrating different specialised processors are now the rule also in consumer markets, and energy efficiency is an issue across the entire computing spectrum from the wearable device to the high performance cluster. These trends pose significant issues: software development is a bottleneck because efficient programming for parallel and heterogeneous architectures is difficult, and application development remains a labour-intensive and expensive activity; non-deterministic timing in multicore chips poses a huge problem whenever a guaranteed response time is needed; software is typically not aware of the energy it uses, and therefore does not use hardware efficiently. Security is a cross-cutting problem, which in some cases is addressed through hardware-enforced "secure zones". This presentation discusses the recent evolution in computing architectures focusing on examples from European research and innovation projects, with a look forward to some promising innovations in the field like bio-inspired, probabilistic and approximate computing.

Dr. Sandro D'Elia is Project Officer at the European Commission Unit A/3 "Complex Systems & Advanced Computing". He spent a significant part of his career as IT project manager, first in the private sector and then in the IT service of the European Commission. In 2009 he moved to a position of research project officer. His role is evaluating, negotiating, controlling and supporting research and innovation projects financed by the European Commission, contributing to the drafting of the research and innovation work programme, and contributing to European policies on software, cyber-physical systems and advanced computing.

Thursday, March 26
Auditorium, 09:00 - 10:00

Architectures for Mixed-Criticality Systems based on Networked Multi-Core Chips

Prof. Dr. Roman Obermaisser, University of Siegen

Abstract of talk: Mixed-criticality architectures with support for modular certification make the integration of application subsystems with different safety assurance levels both technically and economically feasible. Strict segregation of these subsystems is a key requirement to avoid fault propagation and unintended side-effects due to integration. Also, mixed-criticality architectures must deal with the heterogeneity of subsystems that differ not only in their criticality, but also in the underlying computational models and the timing requirements. Non safety-critical subsystems often demand adaptability and support for dynamic system structures, while certification standards impose static configurations for safety-critical subsystems. Several aspects such as time and space partitioning, heterogeneous computational models and adaptability were individually addressed at different integration levels including distributed systems, the chip-level and software execution environments. However, a holistic architecture for the seamless mixed-criticality integration encompassing distributed systems, multi-core chips, operating systems and hypervisors is an open research problem. This presentation discusses the state-of-the-art of mixed-criticality systems and presents research challenges towards a hierarchical mixed-criticality platform with support for strict segregation of subsystems, heterogeneity and adaptability.

Prof. Dr. Roman Obermaisser is full professor at the Division for Embedded Systems at University of Siegen in Germany. He has studied computer sciences at Vienna University of Technology and received the Master's degree in 2001. In February 2004, Roman Obermaisser has finished his doctoral studies in Computer Science with Prof. Hermann Kopetz at Vienna University of Technology as research advisor. In July 2009, Roman Obermaisser has received the habilitation ("Venia docendi") certificate for Technical Computer Science. His research work focuses on system architectures for distributed embedded real-time systems. He is the author of numerous conference and journal publications. He also wrote books on cross-domain system architectures for embedded systems, event-triggered and time-triggered control paradigms and time-triggered communication protocols. He has also participated in several EU research projects (e.g. DECOS, NextTTA, universAAL) and was the coordinator of the European research projects GENESYS and ACROSS. At present Roman Obermaisser coordinates the European research project DREAMS that will establish a mixed-criticality architecture for networked multi-core chips.

Friday, March 27
Auditorium, 09:00 - 10:00

Time Predictability in High-Performance Mixed-Criticality Multicore Systems

Dr. Francisco Cazorla, Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Abstract of talk: While the search for high-performance will continue to be one of the main driving factors in computer design and development, there is an increasing need for time predictability across computing domains including high-performance (datacentre and supercomputers), handheld and embedded devices. The trend towards using computer systems to increasingly control essential aspects of human beings and the increasing connectivity across devices will naturally lead to situations in which applications - partially executed in handheld and datacentre computers, directly connect with more embedded critical systems such as cars or medical devices.
The problem lies in the fact that high-performance is usually achieved by deploying aggressive hardware features (speculation, caches, heterogeneous designs) that negatively impact time predictability. The challenge lies on finding hardware/software designs that balance high-performance and time-predictability as needed by the application environment.
In this talk I will focus on the increasing needs of time predictability in computing systems. I will present some of the main challenges in the design of multicores and manycores, widely deployed in the different computer domains, to provide increasing degrees of time predictability without significantly degrading average performance. I will present the work done in my research group in two different directions to reach this goal, namely, probabilistic multicore systems and the analysis of COTS multicore processors.

Dr. Francisco J. Cazorla is a researcher at the National Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and the leader of the CAOS research group (Computer Architecture - Operating System) at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (http://www.bsc.es/caos). His research area covers the design for both high-performance and real-time systems. He has led several research projects funded by industry including several processor vendor companies (IBM, Sun microsystems) and the European Space Agency. He has also participated in European FP6 (SARC) and FP7 Projects (MERASA, parMERASA). He led the FP7 PROARTIS project and currently leads the FP7 PROXIMA project. He has co-authored over 70 papers in international refereed conferences and has several patents on the area.