1st Workshop on Democratizing Domain-Specific Accelerators (WDDSA 2022)

In conjunction with the 55th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 55) on 10/2/2022 @ Chicago

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The evolution of computer architecture always starts with designing domain-specific ones and then turning them into general-purpose ones. For example, GPUs were just accelerators for computer graphics two decades ago, but now, GPUs are the most widely used general-purpose vector processors. Recent computer architecture trends again fall back to the wave of designing domain-specific accelerators (DSA). However, research projects have successfully used emerging accelerators for applications beyond their original target domains. Inspired by recent research projects and the story of GPGPUs (General-purpose computing on GPUs), this workshop intends to bring together experts from academia and industry to share their efforts in democratizing domain-specific accelerators. Through the presented work, WDDSA would like to explore the potential to lead the renaissance of general-purpose computing on emerging DSAs. 

While we are interested in work that supports general-purpose computing on recent DSAs, we also encourage submissions in general on DSAs and their infrastructure. This workshop is interested in but is not limited to the following topics.

1. Novel use cases of an accelerator where applications are outside accelerators’ original application domains
2. Systems, programming, and software for democratizing domain-specific accelerators.
3. Architectural support for democratizing domain-specific accelerators.
4. Performance/power/energy evaluation/analysis of democratizing domain-specific accelerators
5. Implications to future “democratized” accelerator design.

 This workshop invites three types of presentations.

1. Applications and demonstration on projects with artifacts available for the community to use and extend. The submission can be based on an already published work (published within 12 months upon the submission deadline). The presentation should consider including a live demo.
2. Research papers on work-in-progress projects with preliminary results.
3. Position papers on directions for research and development.

Schedule

Time	Topics
1:00p-1:15p	Opening Remarks: Why WDDSA?
1:15p-2:06p	First Session: “What are the potential accelerators” Chair: Yufei Ding – FlowGNN: A Dataflow Architecture for Real-Time Workload-Agnostic Graph Neural Network Inference – Kobold: Simplified Cache Coherence for Cache-Attached Accelerators – Hardware Abstractions and Hardware Mechanisms to Support Multi-Task Execution on Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays
2:15p-3:05p	Second Session: “How to easily make an accelerated processing unit” Chair: Chris Torng – GNNBuilder: An Automated Framework for Generic Graph Neural Network Accelerator Generation, Simulation, and Optimization – A Full-Stack Infrastructure for Automating Spatial Architecture Research – Canal: A Flexible Interconnect Generator for Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays
3:30p-4:20p	Third Session: “Where are we in DDSA?“ Chair: Po-An Tsai – RTNN: Accelerating Neighbor Search Using Hardware Ray Tracing – Accelerating Applications using Edge Tensor Processing Units – Accelerating Small Matrix Processing for General-Purpose Linear Algebra Using DNN Accelerator Matrix Engines
4:20p	Panel: “When: is it the right time for DDSA?” Chair: Hung-Wei Tseng Panelists: Derek Chiou (UT Austin/Microsoft) Po-An Tsai (NVIDIA) Ren Wang (Intel)

Submission Guidelines

1. Papers must be submitted in printable PDF format.
2. Papers must be in the standard two-column conference format. There are no strict formatting requirements but use reasonable font sizes and margins, etc.
3. Papers should be 4 to 6 pages, not including references.

Submission Website

https://gpdsa2022.hotcrp.com/

Important Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: August 31, 2022, 23:59 PST (Extended)
• Full paper submission deadline: August 31, 2022, 23:59 PST
• Author notification: September 5, 2022
• Camera-ready due: September 28, 2022
• Workshop date: October 2, 2022

Organizers

• Yufei Ding (University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Christopher Torng (Stanford University)
• Po-An Tsai (NVIDIA Research)
• Hung-Wei Tseng (University of California, Riverside)