Welcome

The goal of The 27th Summer School in Computer Science, organized by the Computing Systems Department, of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, is to gather and discuss in a two-day event the latest and most prominent efforts and advances, both from industry and academia, in the design and development of scalable high-performance interconnection networks, especially those oriented to meet the Exascale challenge and Big-data demands.

• The Summer School program will incorporate technical sessions, practical hands-on, panel discussions, etc.
• The course lessons and talks will be in English.
• Renowned experts will participate as speakers
• Graduate students, Master students, PhD students, professors, engineers, researchers, managers, and other people both from industry and academia are encouraged to participate.

SCOPE

By the year 2023, High-Performance Computing (HPC) Systems are expected to break the performance barrier of the Exaflop (10¹⁸ FLOPS) while their power consumption is kept at current levels (or increases marginally), what is known as the Exascale challenge. In addition, more storage capacity and data-access speed is demanded to HPC clusters and datacenters to manage and store huge amounts of data produced by software applications, what is known as the Big-Data challenge. Indeed, both the Exascale and Big-Data challenges are driving the technological revolution of this decade, motivating big research and development efforts from industry and academia. In this context, the interconnection network plays an essential role in the architecture of HPC systems and datacenters, as the number of processing or storage nodes to be interconnected in these systems is very likely to grow significantly to meet the higher computing and storage demands. Besides, the capacity of the network links is expected to grow, as the roadmaps of several interconnect standards forecast. Therefore, the interconnection network should provide a high communication bandwidth and low latency, otherwise the network becoming the bottleneck of the entire system. In that regard, many design aspects are considered when it comes to improving the interconnection network performance, such as topology, routing algorithm, power consumption, reliability and fault tolerance, congestion control, programming models, control software, etc.

LIST OF TOPICS

The list of topics covered by this summer school includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Interconnect architectures and network technologies for high-speed, low-latency interconnects.
• Scalable network topologies, suitable for interconnecting a huge number of nodes.
• Power saving policies in the interconnect devices and network infrastructure, both at software and hardware level.
• Good practices in the configuration of the network control software.
• Network communication protocols: MPI, RDMA, MapReduce, etc.
• APIs and support for programming models.
• Routing algorithms.
• Quality of Service (QoS).
• Reliability and Fault tolerance.
• Load balancing and traffic scheduling.
• Network Virtualization.
• Congestion Management.
• Applications and Traffic characterization.
• Modeling and simulation tools.
• Performance Evaluation.
• Interfacing accelerators through the interconnect (GPUs, Xeon Phi, etc).
• Network infrastructure in distributed storage, distributed databases and Big-Data.

ORGANIZERS

• Francisco J. Alfaro, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
• Jesús Escudero-Sahuquillo, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

HONORIFIC DIRECTOR

Dr. Isidro Ramos Salavert,
Full Professor of the Department of Computer Systems and Computation,
Technical University of Valencia, Spain