This award is to support a US-Egypt ?Workshop on Software Development for Multicore and Heterogeneous Processors?, to be held in Cairo, Egypt, June 22 to 24, 2009. The U.S. organizer is Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Washington University, Washington, DC. The Egyptian organizers are Dr. Hisham El-Shishiny, Advanced Technology Center, IBM, Cairo, and Dr. Ayman El-Dessouki, President, National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, Cairo, Egypt. Due to unprecedented levels of integration, multicore, manycore and heterogeneous processor technologies are becoming widely available and used. Software, however, is lagging behind, and with this new array of exotic processor architectures, traditional sequential programming methods are no longer applicable. Both systems and application software have a long way to catch with these hardware developments, and computer scientists and engineers as well as application scientists across the world must work together to close this gap. The workshop will bring together U.S. computer scientists and engineers who are leaders in the architectural issues of such modern processors and who are aware of system software and application software requirements with Egyptian scientists who are focused on software engineering and development to tackle the new software challenges. The workshop attendees will include U.S. prominent researchers and select students. Egyptian participants will include scientists from IBM Egypt, Ain Sham University, Cairo University, Alexandria University, the National Research Center, and the National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Science (NARSSS). The proposed workshop will be co-sponsored by the IBM Center for Advanced Studies at Cairo, Egypt. To ensure success, a follow-up focused meeting will be held a few months after the workshop in order to monitor the promote progress on the planned collaborations such as joint proposal writing.
Intellectual merits: These include identifying new operating systems and programming languages research directions to cope up with the new multicore/heterogeneous processor challenge through a highly collaborative framework bringing together experts and students from US and Egypt. The resulting interactions may lead to practical suggestions for new programming models, new features to be incorporated in OS/run-time systems, methods to migrate existing software applications to multicore systems. Longer range collaboration will be enacted by using this workshop and follow up event to produce joint research proposal(s) to funding agencies in Egypt and/or the U.S.
Broader impacts: The broader impact lies in the fact that the proposed workshop is expected to result in innovative research directions, due to the participation of top experts in the field. The workshop would involve active participation of U.S. and Egyptian researchers and students including women from both sides. The workshop will be an opportunity to get the new generation of scientists to explore working together and understanding the differences in the culture of science across the globe. This project is co-funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations.
