Awards

Best Paper Award at HiPC 2006 Conference
The paper titled 'Algorithmic Ramifications of Prefetching in Memory Hierarchy' by Akshat Verma (IBM India Research Lab) and Sandeep Sen (IIT Delhi) won the Best Paper Award (Track: Algorithms and Applications) at the 13th Int'l Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC 2006). The paper answers two key questions: (i) Are the models of hierarchical memory used for algorithm design in high performance architectures with prefetching-support (e.g., Bluegene) effective in predicting the performance of the algorithms, and (ii) If the models need to be enhanced, what are the changes required in the memory models and the algorithms. The authors show that existing I/O models are insufficient to capture prefetching and the running times for various algorithms predicted by these models may be off by a factor of hundreds. The authors then propose the 'Prefetch Model' that faithfully captures prefetching, and propose algorithms that are optimal in the Prefetch model.