9th NiPS Summer School 2018 – Call for participation

 9th NiPS Summer School 2018 – Call for participation

International Summer School on Energy Aware Transprecision Computing 
Perugia (Italy) – July 17-20, 2018

 
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For further informations about deadlines and registration: http://www.nipslab.org/summerschool2018 

Please notice that school attendance is limited to 70 students and the participation will be assessed on a first-come/first-serve
basis, subjected to acceptance from the Organizing Committee. 
Deadline for registration: 5 July 2018
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International Summer School on Energy Aware Transprecision Computing 
  
Perugia, Italy 
Tuesday July 17 – Friday July 20, 2018 
  
The NiPS Summer School on “Energy Aware Transprecision Computing” is a 4-days school experience devoted to the foundation of a novel approach to computing: the transprecision computing. The nature-inspired driving principle behind this new approach is that almost any application involves a large amount of intermediate calculations, whose accuracy is irrelevant to the final user, who is interested only in the reliability and validity of the final result. The main reason why in today’s systems these intermediate steps are still performed in full-precision is that existing hardware, runtime software, programming environments and algorithmic approaches do not offer well-assessed solutions to relax accuracy in a controllable way without sacrificing reliability. Lifting this limitation allows a slew of opportunities to arise, which will reduce time- and energy-to-solution by orders of magnitude, without compromising the accuracy and reliability of the final result. 
This Summer School has a broad scope ranging from physical and mathematical foundation to low level technological aspects, to advanced compilation techniques. We will deal with transprecision computing, discussing its potential applications in a wide range of practical cases: from the tiny nodes of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), to the large computing centers of High Performance Computing (HPC). 
  
The NiPS Summer School is organized by the Noise in Physical Systems Laboratory (http://www.nipslab.org) in collaboration with the OPRECOMP project (http://oprecomp.eu), and it is open to everybody. Previous training or experience in computer science as well as a background in computer architecture or compilation is recommended. 
  
=== Venue ===
The Summer School will take place at the Hotel Giò in Perugia, in central Italy. 
The Summer school is scheduled to start on July 16th with a welcome cocktail at 18:00. Lectures will start on July 17th at 9:00 and end on July 20th at 18:00. 
Lectures will run on mornings and afternoons from 9:00 to 18:00. 
  
On July 18th at 14:30 it is foreseen a touristic guided excursion through the Trasimeno lake and, following, the social dinner in a special location. 
  
Accompanying persons are welcome to the summer school. Touristic attractions and cultural events, including the Umbria Jazz Festival, one of the most important jazz festivals in the world and has been held annually since 1973, that will be running in Perugia during the summer schooldays. 
  
=== Scientific program ===

Fundamentals on energy: 
– Fundamentals on energy (Luca Gammaitoni) 
– Physics of Information (Luca Gammaitoni/Igor Neri) 
  
Algorithms: 
– Transprecision algorithms as a disruptive technology for challenging the Exascale energy barrier (Andrew Emerson)
– Adaptive-precision algorithms for sparse linear systems (Enrique Quintana/Andres Tomas) 
  
SW and TOOLS:  
– Advanced compilation techniques (Andrea Marongiu) 
– Transprecision Floating-Point Library (Giuseppe Tagliavini) 
  
Applications: 
– Integrating reduced precision concepts into applications and real code (Florian Scheidegger) 
– Integrating reduced precision concepts into applications and real code (Mahwish Arif/JunKyu Lee) 
  
Architecture and Circuits: 
– RISC-V ISA/ Microarchitecture (Frank K. Gürkaynak) 
– Parallel Ultra Low-Power Processing ,PULP, systems (Davide Rossi) 
– FPGA programming using arbitrary precision data-types (Dionysios Diamantopoulos) 
– Approximate DRAM and memory controllers (Norbert Wehn) 
  
Hands on session:
– GAPUINO board/Mr. Wolf based board (Francesco Paci)
– PULP (Fabian Schuiki)