Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems

Call-for-Papers

Special Issue on Multicore Enabled Multimedia Applications & Architectures

The trend of multicore processors development brings a shift of paradigm in applications development. Traditionally, increasing clock frequency is one of the main dimensions for conventional processors to achieve higher performance gains. Application developers used to improve performance of their applications by just waiting for faster processor platforms. Today, increasing clock frequency has reached a point of diminishing returns—and even negative returns if power is taken into account. Multicore processors, also known as Chip multiprocessors (CMPs), promise a power-efficiency way to increase performance and become more prevalent in vendors’ solutions, for example, IBM CELL Broadband Engine processors, Intel Core 2 Dual processors, and so on. However, the application or algorithm development process must be significantly changed in order to fully explore the potential of multicore processors.

This special issue is to discuss related challenges, issues, case studies, and solutions, especially focusing on multimedia-related applications, architectures, and programming environments, for example, understanding the complexity of developing a new application or porting an existing application onto a multicore processor. Possible topics include:

1. Architectures to support emerging multimedia applications

· Future trends that will influence the future media application design

· Balance between instruction-, data-, and thread-level parallelism

· Cache and memory subsystems to support the huge amount of computation

· Efficient on-chip interconnect

· Synchronization, including speculative methods

2.   Emerging applications on multi-core

· Exploit multi-core architecture efficiently

· Design, re-design, or optimize algorithms for multi-core architecture

· Innovative multimedia algorithms for multi-core architectures

· Emerging applications and usage models that are enabled by multi-core

· Characterization of multimedia applications that will influence multi-core designs

3.   Programming environments for multi-core

· Languages and programming models

· Tools to exploit parallelism with performance, scalability, & correctness

· Differences between programming for multicore architectures and programming for other kinds of parallel architectures

Prospective authors are encouraged to submit high quality, original works which have not appeared or are under consideration for publication in other journals. The relationship to multicore, multimedia signal processing should be explained clearly in the submission.

Instruction for Authors

All manuscripts are subject to review. To be considered for this special issue, prospective authors should submit their complete manuscripts by Sept. 15, 2007, through http://vlsi.edmgr.com. Please select “Special Issue on MULTICORE” as the article type (after entering the manuscript title).

Important Dates

· Manuscript due: September 15, 2007

· Acceptance notification: February 1, 2008

· Target publication date: Second half of 2008

Guest Editors

Dr. Yen-Kuang Chen, Intel Corporation

Dr. Lurng-Kuo Liu, IBM

Prof. Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya, University of Maryland, College Park