Power consumption and space requirements are more and more important issues with real economic and environmental consequences in data center. As one promising approach to addressing such problems, the concept of micro-server has been introduced by major industrial vendors in the past few years. Micro-servers are an emerging type of shared infrastructure server designed for unique data center workloads where many low-power, dense servers may be more efficient than fewer, higher-end servers. The major industrial CPU vendors like Intel and ARM announced their commercial products and related roadmaps of energy-efficient processors for micro-server systems (e.g., Intel Atom series processors, and ARM A9/A15 processors). And major system companies like DELL, HP and SeaMicro also publicized their micro-server systems which integrate tens or hundreds of energy-efficient processors into a single machine or rack. A well-accepted trend is that micro-servers will be one of major sources of server market growth in the next four years.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners to discuss the architecture design and implementation at both the system level and the chip level; and to discuss the application explorations and analysis on micro-sever systems. To encourage discussion between participants, the workshop will include significant time for discussion between presenters and the audience. We also plan to have a keynote speaker and/or panel session.

The research challenges in micro-sever systems are multi-fold. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

1. Architecture design and implementation for energy-efficient processor chips in micro-server systems
Ultra low power microarchitecture
Heterogeneous architecture and multi-core SoCs
On-chip accelerator design
Cache/memory hierarchy
Simulation/emulation methodology
Energy efficient I/O

2. System design for micro-server systems
Energy efficient system design
High density system design
Fault tolerance techniques for micro-server systems, especially for technologies to handle failing without replacement
Exploration on using micro-server in data center and cloud computing
Advanced communication techniques in micro-server based systems

3. Emerging workloads exploration and analysis on micro-server systems
New workloads (including workloads in high volume data processing and analytics, cloud computing, data center, and interconnect of things etc) running on micro-server systems
Workload analysis and optimization
New runtime and execution model for micro-server based heterogeneous architecture
Virtualization on micro-server based systems
Managing many-more compute-nodes using virtualization and/or physicalization
Macro and micro power measurement

We encourage both industry and academic researchers to submit their research. Preliminary results of interesting ideas and work-in-progress are welcome. Submissions that are likely to generate vigorous discussion will be favored!
Paper Submission

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=microserver2012
Important Dates


Abstract / Paper Submission Jan 15, 2012 Jan 25, 2012 (extended)
Author Notification Feb 1, 2012
Final Paper Submission Feb 10, 2012
Workshop Feb 26, 2012