In the past 5 years, astronomy has become one of the biggest consumers of computing resources. Therefore, new computational solutions (both hardware and software) are emerging, dedicated to the various fields of the science. For example, in radioastronomy, instruments are becoming extremely large. Comprising of thousands of antennas, these radio telescopes generate huge amounts of data that have to be analyzed in a timely manner. As a result, large scale systems (both distributed and centralized) are employed for data gathering, filtering, analysis, and imaging. Furthermore, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a very large scale international project, seems to push the limits of radioastronomy data processing to new limits, as proven by pathfinders such as LOFAR, ASKAP, MeerKAT or anzSKA.

All in all, it is expected that astronomy experiments will become larger in all dimensions: larger data collections, more accurate data analysis and processing, and more detailed results (i.e., imaging). This significant increase of the large-size experiments to be performed by the instruments built around the world require not only huge processing power, but also clever system design, all the way from the hardware construction to the software development and deployment.

In this context, this first edition of the Astro-HPC workshop focuses on system design for large-scale astronomy systems. We aim to give specialists from both astronomy and computer science and engineering the opportunity to discuss both the requirements of large-scale high-performance computing systems suitable and/or usable for various astronomy applications, and practical examples of such designs and implementations. Therefore, we encourage both contributions that analyze the size and needs of large-scale astronomy systems to be used in the near future, as well as contributions that show how existing algorithms and methods should be adapted or replaced to the larger scale of these near future experiments.

The workshop will be co-located with ACM/IEEE HPDC (http://www.hpdc.org/2012/) and will take place in June 2012 in Delft, The Netherlands. Astro-HPC 2012 will bring together researchers and practitioners in discussing and creating new knowledge about the astronomy infrastructure and (computational) methods of the future.

The First Workshop on High Performance Computing in Astronomy (Astro-HPC 2012) solicits papers that describe, analyze, evaluate, and/or build large-scale astronomy systems.

• Systems
• Specific design requirements and solutions
• Benchmarking and performance evaluation
• Performance analysis and limitations of new system configurations
• Energy efficiency: predictions, measurements, analysis.
• Accelerators
• Evaluation of accelerator-based systems in the field of astronomy
• The requirements for accelerators in astronomy applications
• The impact of various accelerator on the performance and/or energy of HPC systems for astronomy
• Applications
• Novel large-scale astronomy applications
• Evaluation and benchmarking of applications in large-scale environments
• Updates, tuning, and optimizations of existing astronomy applications
• Algorithms
• Performance evaluation and analysis of traditional algorithms
• Novel algorithms for astronomy kernels

AstroHPC 2012 invites authors to submit original and unpublished work. Submitted papers should be limited to 8 pages (including tables, images, and references) and formatted according to the ACM SIG Style. Please use the Easychair submission site to submit your paper. Only pdf format is accepted. All papers will receive at least three reviews. Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register for the workshop and present the paper.

Accepted workshop papers will appear in the HPDC conference proceedings and will be incorporated in the ACM Digital Library.

The program will be announced shortly after the camera ready versions of the papers are received (20th of April, 2012). We plan for a full-day event with 2 keynote speakers, 6-8 scientific paper presentations, and a Panel session.

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 21-st International ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2012) on June 18/19, 2012 in Delft, the Netherlands. For the registration procedure follow the HPDC link.

For further information please contact the organizing committee at AstroHPC2012@gmail.com and/or any of the organizers.

SocMP is one of the workshops held in conjunction with HPDC'12:

Short Workshop Name	Full Workshop Name
Application Domain
Astro-HPC 2012	Workshop on High-Performance Computing for Astronomy
ECMLS 2012	Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences Workshop
Science Cloud 2012	Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing
SocMP 2012	Workshop on Social Media Processing
Data-Intensive Processing
DIDC 2012	Workshop on Data-Intensive Distributed Computing
ISDP 2012	In-Situ Data Processing Technologies
General
LSAP 2012	Workshop on Large-scale Systems and Applications Performance
Infrastructure
MapReduce'12	Workshop on MapReduce and its Applications
VTDC-2012	Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing