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The 1st Workshop on Many-Task Computing on Grids and Supercomputers (MTAGS) 2008
http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/MTAGS08/
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November 17, 2008
Austin, Texas, USA

Co-located with with IEEE/ACM International Conference for
High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC08)
and Sponsorred by IEEE

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The 1st workshop on Many-Task Computing on Grids and Supercomputers (MTAGS)
will provide the scientific community a dedicated forum for presenting new
research, development, and deployment efforts of loosely coupled large scale
applications on large scale clusters, Grids, and/or Supercomputers. Many-task
computing, the theme of the workshop encompasses loosely coupled applications,
which are generally composed of many tasks (both independent and dependent
tasks) to achieve some larger application goal. We welcome paper submissions
on all topics related to MTC on large scale systems. Papers will be
peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be published by IEEE/ACM through the
SC08 proceedings (pending approval). For more information, please visit
http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/MTAGS08/.

Scope
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This workshop will focus on the ability to manage and execute large scale
applications on today's largest clusters, Grids, and Supercomputers. Clusters
with 50K+ processor cores are beginning to come online (i.e. TACC Sun
Constellation System - Ranger), Grids (i.e. TeraGrid) with a dozen sites and
100K+ processors, and supercomputers with 160K processors (i.e. IBM BlueGene/P).
Large clusters and supercomputers have traditionally been high performance
computing (HPC) systems, as they are efficient at executing tightly coupled
parallel jobs within a particular machine with low-latency interconnects; the
applications typically use message passing interface (MPI) to achieve the needed
inter-process communication. On the other hand, Grids have been the preferred
platform for more loosely coupled applications that tend to be managed and
executed through workflow systems. In contrast to HPC (tightly coupled
applications), these loosely coupled applications make up a new class of
applications as what we call Many-Task Computing (MTC). MTC systems generally
involve the execution of independent, sequential jobs that can be individually
scheduled on many different computing resources across multiple administrative
boundaries. MTC systems typically achieve this using various grid computing
technologies and techniques, and often times use files to achieve the
inter-process communication as alternative communication mechanisms than MPI.
MTC is reminiscent to High Throughput Computing (HTC); however, MTC differs
from HTC in the emphasis of using many computing resources over short periods
of time to accomplish many computational tasks, where the primary metrics are
measured in seconds (e.g. FLOPS, tasks/sec, MB/s I/O rates). HTC on the other
hand requires large amounts of computing for longer times (months and years,
rather than hours and days, and are generally measured in operations per month).

Today's existing HPC systems are a viable platform to host MTC applications.
However, some challenges arise in large scale applications when run on large
scale systems, which can hamper the efficiency and utilization of these large
scale systems. These challenges vary from local resource manager scalability
and granularity, efficient utilization of the raw hardware, shared file system
contention and scalability, reliability at scale, application scalability, and
understanding the limitations of the HPC systems in order to identify good
candidate MTC applications.

For more information, please visit http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/MTAGS08/.

Topics
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MTAGS 2008 topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Compute Resource Management in large scale clusters, large Grids, and Supercomputers
o Scheduling
o Job execution frameworks
o Local resource manager extensions
o Performance evaluation of resource managers in use on large scale systems
o Challenges in running many-task workloads on HPC systems
* Data Management in large scale Grid and Supercomputer environments:
o Data-Aware Scheduling
o Shared File System performance and scalability in large deployments
o Distributed file systems
o Data caching frameworks and techniques
* Large-Scale Workflow Systems
o Workflow system performance and scalability analysis
o Scalability of workflow systems
o Workflow infrastructure and e-Science middleware
o Programming Paradigms and Models
* Large-Scale Many-Task Applications
o Large-scale many-task applications
o Large-scale many-task data-intensive applications
o Large-scale high throughput computing (HTC) applications
o Quasi-supercomputing applications, deployments, and experiences

Paper Submission and Publication
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Authors are invited to submit papers with unpublished, original work of not more
than 6/10 pages (6 pages for short papers, and 10 pages for standard papers) of
double column text using single spaced 10 point size on 8.5 x 11 inch pages, as
per IEEE 8.5 x 11 manuscript guidelines
(ftp://pubftp.computer.org/Press/Outgoing/proceedings/instruct.pdf or
ftp://pubftp.computer.org/Press/Outgoing/proceedings/instruct.doc). A 250 word
abstract (PDF format) must be submitted online at
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/MTAGS2008/ before the deadline of August 15th,
2008 at 11:59PM PST; the final 6/10 page papers in PDF format will be due on
September 6th, 2008 at 11:59PM PST. Papers will be peer-reviewed, and accepted
papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as part of the IEEE digital
library. Notifications of the paper decisions will be sent out by October 1st.
Selected excellent work may be eligible for additional post-conference publication
as journal articles or book chapters. Submission implies the willingness of at
least one of the authors to register and present the paper. For more information,
please visit http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/MTAGS08/.

Important Dates
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* Abstract Due: August 15th, 2008
* Papers Due: September 6th, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: October 1st, 2008
* Camera Ready Papers Due: October 15th, 2008
* Workshop Date: November 17th, 2008



Committee Members
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Workshop Chairs
* Yong Zhao, Microsoft
* Ian Foster, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory
* Ioan Raicu, University of Chicago

Technical Committee
* David Abramson, Monash University, Australia
* Dan Ardelean, Google, USA
* Pete Beckman, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
* Peter Dinda, Northwestern University, USA
* Ian Foster, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
* Alan Gara, IBM, USA
* Bob Grossman, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
* Indranil Gupta, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
* Alexandru Iosup, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
* Tevfik Kosar, Louisiana State University, USA
* Chuang Liu, Ask.com, USA
* Shiyong Lu, Wayne State University, USA
* Reagan Moore, University of California at San Diego, USA
* Steven Newhouse, Microsoft, USA
* Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Purdue University, USA
* Marlon Pierce, Indiana University, USA
* Ioan Raicu, University of Chicago, USA
* Dan Reed, Microsoft, USA
* Matei Ripeanu, University of British Columbia, Canada
* Rick Stevens, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
* Xian-He Sun, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
* Alex Szalay, The Johns Hopkins University, USA
* Douglas Thain, Univeristy of Notre Dame, USA
* Greg Thain, Univeristy of Wisconsin, USA
* Mike Wilde, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
* Matthew Woitaszek, The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, USA
* Lingyun Yang, Yahoo Search, USA
* Sherali Zeadally, University of the District of Columbia, USA
* Yong Zhao, Microsoft, USA