DAMP 2008: Workshop on
             Declarative Aspects of Multicore Programming
                        San Francisco, CA, USA
                      (colocated with POPL 2008)
                          January 9, 2008
		   SUBMISSION DEADLINE: OCTOBER 26

Parallelism is going mainstream. Many chip manufactures are turning to
multicore  processor  designs  rather than  scalar-oriented  frequency
increases as  a way to  get performance in their  desktop, enterprise,
and mobile  processors. This  endeavor is not  likely to  succeed long
term  if  mainstream  applications  cannot  be  parallelized  to  take
advantage  of  tens  and  eventually  hundreds  of  hardware  threads.
Multicore  architectures will  differ in  significant ways  from their
multisocket  predecessors. For example,  the communication  to compute
bandwidth ratio is  likely to be higher, which  will positively impact
performance. More generally, multicore architectures introduce several
new  dimensions  of variability  in  both  performance guarantees  and
architectural  contracts,  such as  the  memory  model,  that may  not
stabilize for several generations of product.

Programs  written  in  functional  or  (constraint-)logic  programming
languages, or  even in other languages  with a controlled  use of side
effects, can  greatly simplify parallel  programming. Such declarative
programming  allows  for  a  deterministic  semantics  even  when  the
underlying  implementation  might   be  highly  non-deterministic.  In
addition to  simplifying programming  this can simplify  debugging and
analyzing correctness.

DAMP is  a one-day  workshop seeking to  explore ideas  in programming
language design  that will greatly simplify  programming for multicore
architectures,  and  more   generally  for  tightly  coupled  parallel
architectures.    The   emphasis   will    be   on    functional   and
(constraint-)logic  programming, but  any  programming language  ideas
that aim to raise the level  of abstraction are welcome. DAMP seeks to
gather  together  researchers in  declarative  approaches to  parallel
programming  and  to   foster  cross  fertilization  across  different
approaches.

Specific topics include, but are not limited to: 

* suitability   of  functional   and   (constraint-)logic  programming
  languages to multicore applications;
* run-time issues such as garbage collection or thread scheduling;
* architectural features that may  enhance the parallel performance of
  declarative languages;
* type  systems  and  analysis  for  accurately  knowing  or  limiting
  dependencies, aliasing, effects, and nonpure features;
* ways of specifying or hinting at parallelism;
* ways of specifying or hinting  at data placement which abstract away
  from any details of the machine;
* compiler    techniques,    automatic   parallelization,    automatic
  granularity control;
* experiences  of  and  challenges  arising  from  making  declarative
  programming practical;
* technology for debugging parallel programs;
* design and  implementation of domain-specific  declarative languages
  for multi-core;

Submission:

  Submitted  papers  papers  should  not  exceed  15  pages  in  LLNCS
  format. Submission is electronic via:

  http://www.easychair.org/DAMP2008/


Important dates:

  Paper submission:        Oct 26
  Notification to authors: Nov 30
  Camera ready:            Dec 14

Program Chair:

  Manuel Hermenegildo
  Technical University of Madrid / IMDEA-Software -- herme@fi.upm.es 
  University of New Mexico -- herme@unm.edu

Program Committee: 

  Koen De Bosschere (U. of Gent, Belgium)
  Manuel Carro (Tech. U. of Madrid, Spain)
  Manuel Chakravarty (U. of New S. Wales, Australia)
  Clemens Grelck (U. of Luebeck, Germany)
  Dan Grossman (U. of Washington, USA)
  Suresh Jagannathan (Purdue U., USA)
  Pedro Lopez-Garcia (Tech. U. of Madrid, Spain)
  Lee Naish (Melbourne University, Australia)
  Leaf Petersen (Intel Corporation, USA)
  Enrico Pontelli (New Mexico State U., USA)
  John Reppy (U. of Chicago, USA)
  Vitor Santos-Costa (U. of Porto, Portugal)

General Chairs:

  Leaf Petersen
  Neal Glew
  Intel Corporation
  Santa Clara, CA, USA
  leaf.petersen@intel.com
  neal.glew@intel.com 

URL:

  http://www.cliplab.org/Conferences/DAMP08

Past DAMPs:

  http://glew.org/damp2006
  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~damp