The 27th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing

The latest instance of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD) was held in Florianópolis, Brazil, 18-21 October, 2015. It was an excellent event to get exposure to a wide range of interesting research topics, to get up to speed with the latest technologies from major HPC vendors, to do networking, and to enjoy fantastic Brazilian food (let's not forget the pão de queijo).

SBAC-PAD received over 200 participants, which enjoyed the main event, its two tutorials, three keynote lectures, seven sponsor talks, and seven satellite events (including international workshops such as the 4th Workshop on Parallel Programming Models and the 6th Workshop on Applications for Multi-Core Architectures, and Brazilian events such as the 16th Symposium on High Performance Computational Systems). In total, 26 papers were presented in the main event, while other 82 presentations (including posters) happened in the satellite events.

The keynote speakers this time were Prof. Geoffrey Fox (Indiana University) who talked largely about the Big Data environment, from applications to systems; Prof. Satoshi Matsuoka (Tokyo Tech) that gave a perspective on the convergence of Big Data and HPC in terms of the system architecture features that are needed for both fields; Prof. Onur Mutlu (Carnegie-Mellon University) who presented new perspectives on memory system design for data intensive computing.

This SBAC-PAD edition had six parallel events. One of them was WSCAD (Symposium of High Performance Computational Systems, in Portuguese). This was the 16th edition of this symposium and, even though it is a Portuguese event, 7 out of 22 papers were written in English. Best paper authors are going to be invited to submit an extended version of their work to the Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience journal.

For the last few years SBAC-PAD had been held in other countries in addition to Brazil. This is an effort to make the conference more international and attract more people. Next SBAC-PAD is going to be in Los Angeles. This is definitively a good Latin American conference, that has potential to become an important reference not only locally, but globally.