The International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms

[Daniel Nenni]

The International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms (ERSA), has been an academic event since 2001, held annually in Las Vegas (July). (for more, visit: ERSA News | The International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms )




ERSA is a part of WORLDCOMP Congress with more than 2000 attendees, covering all topics of computer science, engineering, and applications.

ERSA-IS (ERSA Industrial Session) brings a new emphasis to the commercial and industrial challenges in preparing commercial applications for systems using reconfigurable technology.

ERSA-IS focus on challenges, tools, available technologies and opportunities when it comes to developing and supporting applications, both academic and commercial, that involve reconfigurable heterogeneous computing technologies across mobile, embedded, and HPC domains.

The longer-term aim is to establish an Industrial Session (ERSA-IS) with more than thousand attendees.

ERSA Scope: All aspects of reconfigurable computing, including classical programmable logic, as well as reconfigurable multiprocessing, multi-core systems, reconfigurable high-performance computing, reconfigurable heterogeneous systems, etc.
ERSA explores emerging trends and novel ideas in the area of parallel, reconfigurable, high-performance computing architecture, design methods and applications. ERSA is promoting multidisciplinary research and new visionary approaches including bio-inspired architectures, computational biology, physics etc.

Aims
• Developing complex, commercial applications is a main trend in all areas of computing technologies. Currently, there is no industrial conference(s) focused on commercial application development for reconfigurable, embedded computing systems.
• The aim of ERSA-IS is to establish a Reconfigurable Computing Developers Conference to bring together commercial interests in reconfigurable computing involving academic researchers and commercial entrepreneurs from developed countries and emerging market economies.
• Establish an internet based Journal “ERSA Developers News” and portal to facilitated communication between developers, vendors, and customers. Currently, there are no such journals available in reconfigurable computing area.

Mission
• The mission of ERSA-IS is to assemble a coordinated research and commercial meeting held in same location and dates. The goal is to provide a forum for exchange of ideas in a number of research areas that interact with ideas, technologies, and aims of different commercial companies. The internet based “ERSA Developers News” Journal, and portal, make the forum lasting around the year.

Benefits
• ERSA-IS with WORLDCOMP brings together more than 2,200 attendees from over 85 countries, being, an excellent place for this joint event.
• ERSA-IS helps to find and establish new commercial and academic contacts from all over the world. It helps small companies looking for
o collaborators to work with on their efforts
o potential customers for their items
o sources of ideas for new features
• ERSA-IS reduces the cost for creating individual contacts between different parties, which often involves travelling over long distances, form one continent to another.
This provides a meaningful return on investment - trading off one or two expensive trips for one trip.
• Las Vegas, has a reputation for bringing technology oriented businesses together to showcase and has reasonable access from Asia, Europe, South America, and North America

[jsn_nardllc]

It appears there is growing interest in reconfigurable systems in the commercial arena. As FPGA usage becomes more widespread, making reconfigurable IP part of the FPGA offerings will really make this technique mainstream. The availability of partial on the fly reprogrammability of the new Altera Arria V and Cyclone V FPGA along with integration of a hard, dual ARM Cortex-A9 processors will make it a favorite of system architects.

Best Regards,

Jim

[Toomas]

[hide][top]ERSA 2012, types of sessions, call for sponsors

[hide][top]In 2012, ERSA emphasise the commercial and industrial challenges in reconfigurable technology:

"Premier International Gathering for Commercial and Academic Reconfigurable Computing Application Developers"

July 16-19, 2012, Las Vegas, USA

Visit ERSA Homepage: ERSA News | The International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms.

ERSA will have traditional Academic Part and Industrial or Developers Session.
Industrial papers are not evaluated from academic point of view, but must have strong technical content.

[hide][top]ERSA 2012 consist of

Developers Session consist of

• Presentations on techniques, tools and resources that are available for commercial use
• Posters that *can* be promotionally oriented
• Discussion sessions on challenges facing RC developers (technical challenges; business challenges)
• Product demonstrations, exhibitions and overviews

Academic Session consists of

• Invited sessions and speakers
• Regular papers
• Discussion sessions

Note, each session may have academic and developer’s section; it is most appreciated.

Deadlines:

• Submissions of Papers: March 12, 2012
• Proposals for Sessions: Feb. 14, 2012

For submission, send you paper in pdf format to sub@ersaconf.org

For inquiries, contact by email: inf@ersaconf.org

[top]Call For Sponsors:

Sponsor ERSA and raise your visibility, and show your support for advancing reconfigurable systems algorithms and systems in both academic and commercial applications!

ERSA is a part of WORLDCOMP Congress bringing together more than 2,200 attendees from over 85 countries over the world. Companies, participating at ERSA/WORLDCOMP, get their products and organizations in front of this huge number of attendees and countries.

This something that is very expensive to do any other way. It provides a meaningful return on investment (or cost savings) that companies can evaluate - trading off one or two expensive trips for one trip and sponsorship of ERSA-IS at WORLDCOMP.

Companies may host half or full day seminars to introduce and demonstrate their new technologies and products.

For sponsorship details, visit: Sponsorship Levels

[hide][top]For Posts and Proposals:

Leave your post here at SemiWiki

If you have any proposals and/or comments, please make these on “ERSA Registration & Proposals for ERSA-IS” page at: ERSA-IS Registration

[Toomas]

Companies are called to host half or full day seminars to introduce and demonstrate their new technologies and products.
ERSA'12 Conference Homepage

ERSA at Las Vegas is an excellent place to arrange different seminars to introduce your products and technologies. ERSA runs four consecutive days together with WorldComp Congress and brings together more than 2000 attendees.

[hide][top]If you are interested in, contact with ERSA org committee by email: org@ersaconf.org or submit your proposal at ERSA Registration and Proposals page ERSA-IS Registration .

You can also propose sessions, demos, exhibitions, etc.

ERSA-IS Hot Topic:
“Reconfigurable Computing Application Development for Heterogeneous Run-time Environments”

Focus on challenges, tools, available technologies, and opportunities when it comes to developing and supporting applications.

ERSA-IS Proposed Featured Sessions:

• Developing heterogeneous systems (CPU plus FPGA) using the OpenCL standard
• Developing IP cores and scalable libraries for heterogeneous systems
• Hardware security and trust in reconfigurable heterogeneous systems

We strongly encourage companies, developers, entrepreneurs to arrange seminars, demos, exhibitions, talks, presentations etc., and to be sponsors for ERSA-IS. We strongly encourage employers, developers, students, and researchers to attend.

Sponsor ERSA and raise your visibility, and show your support for advancing reconfigurable systems algorithms and systems in both academic and commercial applications!

For sponsorship details, visit: Sponsorship Levels

Looking forward to meet you in Las Vegas!

[Toomas]

CALL for Dedicated Sessions

DEADLINE: Feb. 14, 2012

ERSA’12 Homepage: ERSA'12 Conference Homepage

[hide][top]Dedicated Sessions

[hide][top]Dedicated sessions consist of invited papers and regular papers. You can choose the topic of your session. For more details, contact the conference chair Toomas Plaks by email: org@ersaconf.org

You can also make proposals for tutorials, discussion sessions, and seminars.

Proposals for sessions must include:

Brief description of the session

1. Title of the Specialized Sessions
2. An introduction, a list of topics/scope of the technical session, the novelty, and the importance to the ERSA audience.
3. A short biography of the Specialized Sessions organizers (up to three persons).

List of contributors

1. A list of possible contributors, including titles, authors, contact information of the corresponding authors, and a short abstract of each contribution.
2. A list of Invited Talks and Authors, including tentative titles, short abstracts, and Bios with contact information
3. Technical session should not include more than one overview paper.
4. Organisers should not contribute more than one paper.

Proposed Featured Industrial Sessions:

• Developing heterogeneous systems (CPU plus FPGA) using the OpenCL standard
• Developing IP cores and scalable libraries for heterogeneous systems
• Hardware security and trust in reconfigurable heterogeneous systems

Proposed Dedicated Industrial Sections

1. "R/A/M in Finance"
Reconfigurable / Adaptive / Multicore Computing in Finance and Banking
Chair: Steven Guccione, VP Senior Technology Manager, Bank of America

Note, each session may have academic and developer’s sections; it is most appreciated.

Hot Topics for Academic Session

• Formal Methods and Engineering: Tools and Theory of Design Methods
• Reconfigurable and Evolvable Hardware Architectures: Bio-Inspired, Low-Power, Multi-Core, Achronix, NuFPGA, etc.
• Security: Threats and Solutions for Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

Academic Session consists of

• Invited sessions and speakers
• Regular papers
• Discussion sessions

Proposed Dedicated Academic Sections

1. “Self-Organizing Reconfigurable Embedded Systems”
Chair: Prof. Christophe Bobda: University of Arkansas, USA
Co-Chair: Prof. Achim Rettberg: University of Oldenburg, Germany
Co-Chair: Dr. Ali Ahmadinia, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

[hide][top]Sponsor ERSA and raise your visibility, and show your support for advancing reconfigurable systems and algorithms, and systems in both academic and commercial applications!

For sponsorship details, visit: Sponsorship Levels

Looking forward to meet you in Las Vegas!

For all inquiries contact: inf@ersaconf.org

[Toomas]

CALL for Dedicated Sessions

DEADLINE: Feb. 14, 2012

ERSA’12 Homepage: ERSA'12 Conference Homepage

[top]Dedicated Sessions

[top]Dedicated sessions consist of invited papers and regular papers. You can choose the topic of your session. For more details, contact the conference chair Toomas Plaks by email: org@ersaconf.org

You can also make proposals for tutorials, discussion sessions, and seminars.

Proposals for sessions must include:

Brief description of the session

1. Title of the Specialized Sessions
2. An introduction, a list of topics/scope of the technical session, the novelty, and the importance to the ERSA audience.
3. A short biography of the Specialized Sessions organizers (up to three persons).

List of contributors

1. A list of possible contributors, including titles, authors, contact information of the corresponding authors, and a short abstract of each contribution.
2. A list of Invited Talks and Authors, including tentative titles, short abstracts, and Bios with contact information
3. Technical session should not include more than one overview paper.
4. Organisers should not contribute more than one paper.

Proposed Featured Industrial Sessions:

• Developing heterogeneous systems (CPU plus FPGA) using the OpenCL standard
• Developing IP cores and scalable libraries for heterogeneous systems
• Hardware security and trust in reconfigurable heterogeneous systems

Proposed Dedicated Industrial Sections

1. "R/A/M in Finance"
Reconfigurable / Adaptive / Multicore Computing in Finance and Banking
Chair: Steven Guccione, VP Senior Technology Manager, Bank of America

Note, each session may have academic and developer’s sections; it is most appreciated.

Hot Topics for Academic Session

• Formal Methods and Engineering: Tools and Theory of Design Methods
• Reconfigurable and Evolvable Hardware Architectures: Bio-Inspired, Low-Power, Multi-Core, Achronix, NuFPGA, etc.
• Security: Threats and Solutions for Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

Academic Session consists of

• Invited sessions and speakers
• Regular papers
• Discussion sessions

Proposed Dedicated Academic Sections

1. “Self-Organizing Reconfigurable Embedded Systems”
Chair: Prof. Christophe Bobda: University of Arkansas, USA
Co-Chair: Prof. Achim Rettberg: University of Oldenburg, Germany
Co-Chair: Dr. Ali Ahmadinia, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

[top]Sponsor ERSA and raise your visibility, and show your support for advancing reconfigurable systems and algorithms, and systems in both academic and commercial applications!

For sponsorship details, visit: Sponsorship Levels

Looking forward to meet you in Las Vegas!

For all inquiries contact: inf@ersaconf.org

We have received currently seven proposals for dedicated sessions.
If you are planning to submit your proposal, we advise you to connect first with ERSA (inf@ersaconf.org) and show the draft, many proposals should be improved to be accepted.

Deadline: Feb. 14, 2012

[Toomas]

Last year, ERSA Keynote speaker, Prof David Lorge Parnas, presented a talk:
“How Engineering Mathematics can Improve Software”. The main content of his talk can be summarised as (visit ERSA News | The International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms ):

“For many decades computer science researchers have promised that the "Formal Methods" developed by computer scientists would bring about a drastic improvement in the quality and cost of software. That improvement has not materialized. We review the reasons for this failure ... the difference between the notations that are used in formal methods and the mathematics that is essential in other areas of Engineering.“

Can anyone tell us how formal methods can benefit circuit design? In SemiWiki thread “The Problems with SoC IP Integration”, there simguru stated:

“…if you could publish behavioral models that do the same job and have some verification (of usage) built-in and a "black box" layout.”

Sure, but how to build these models, we have to use math obviously, should we use formal methods. Industry is not very keen to use formal methods; contrarily, to be a computer scientist in university and not being a fan of formal methods, it is not very healthy.

Alex Berka (Isynchronise) wrote:

“What kind of logics are suited for parallel forms of deduction? How might one use novel environments and models of computation, for establishing a closer link between mathematics and computer science? What are more efficient language systems and architectures for high performance computing?”

For more read the following:

“Problems in the foundations of computer science, and why functional programming is not suited for parallelism.”

Visit LinkedIn group Synchronic Computation.

What is wrong in “computer” related theories? We don’t like Von Neumann bottleneck, multi-core approach has not been made to work, etc. There are many cases where we feel that our models do not work in way we want.

Should we open a discussion here and continue it at ERSA, where we can meet face-by-face?

[alexberka]

Compared with other disciplines, CS is prone to the formation of competing cults that promote a silver bullet solution to problem areas. I think this has something to do with the fact that the standard models (Turing Machine and Lambda Calculus) do not support high level computation well. I have seen academics evangelise formal methods, object orientation, functional programming, logic programming, agent based programming, and various other approaches as the best and only way of programming.

I like this work because Professor Parnas has the courage to do some finger pointing at emperor’s new clothes, and also because it involves cross fertilisation of concepts between software and other forms of engineering. He is right in pointing out that formal methods are perceived as difficult and are not popular in industry, and that should be cause for suspicion. Parnas is suggesting a programming methodology based on his tabular expressions, that makes it easier for the average programmer to deliver reliable software, compared with formal methods. I am inclined to agree with him, but not with the suggestion that formal methods are wrong because they are not engineering mathematics. This suggests that the latter is as effective as any methodology can be expected to be for developing software.

My work touches on the above in that I developed a formal machine and spatially oriented language model that is oriented to reconfigurable computing. In the future I would like to develop (yet another) programming methodology, based on converging mathematical and computer formalisms on the spatial language model, see the links Toomas mentioned.

[Toomas]

In general, I agree with alexberka.

However, I do not think that the problem with formal methods is that “CS is prone to the formation of competing cults that promote a silver bullet solution to problem areas”. If so, we have to see a battle of giants, as we see a battle on a market of mobile devices, where all giants, Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Nokia are heavily battling. The reason for failure is that formal methods haven’t provided reasonable results to take these methods to use in industry.

Secondly, this is not a reason for failure that formal methods are difficult. To increase the bandwidth of communication channels requires perfect knowledge in signal processing, physics, and maths, and this all together is more difficult than formal methods. Thus, if industry feels that they can really be benefited from formal methods, then they take it into use.

[alexberka]

In the academic arena, there is considerable competition for the programming approach that dominates a department’s research agenda. Apologies if I gave the wrong impression. I was not suggesting that formal methods not having provided reasonable results was due to the approach being a cult, merely alluding to over-enthusiasm and lack of detachment that well funded research movements can acquire.

Ideally, the programming of reconfigurable devices should not require expertise in electronic engineering, physics and maths. IMHO, we should be looking for new language models that are oriented to reconfigurable computing.