The IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC) is a premier forum for presenting, discussing and debating new and innovative ideas and techniques for the characterization of computing system workloads. This symposium brings together researchers in fields related to processor architecture, compilers, operating systems, and languages. This award will provide travel support for students in order to defray the costs of attending and participating in the IISWC conference in September, 2013 in Portland, Oregon, USA. Supporting student travel to attend professional conferences and workshops is a very important mission of the NSF. Broader impacts include training the next generation of researchers in this important research area.
This grant award was used to fund 15 graduate students to attend the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC), a premier conference for computer science research. These students were drawn primarily from accredited Universities all across America (spanning 7 states). Attending IISWC has significant educational value for the awarded students. The technological skills and insights gained by the students at the at the conference will be important in sustaining economic growth and maintaining America's technological superiority. IISWC is a symposium that is dedicated to the understanding and characterization of workloads that run on all types of computing systems. New applications and programming paradigms continue to emerge as the diversity and performance of computers increase. On the one hand, computing workloads evolve and change with advances in microarchitecture, compilers, programming languages, and networking/communication technologies. On the other hand, improvements in computing technology are usually based on a solid understanding and analysis of existing workloads. Whether they are PDAs, wireless and embedded systems at the low end or massively parallel systems at the high end, the design of future computing machines can be significantly improved if we understand the characteristics of the workloads that are expected to run on them. This symposium,sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and the TechnicalCommittee on Computer Architecture, focuses on characterizing and understanding modern computer applications commercial and scientific computing.
