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Final report: Revitalizing Computer Architecture Research (300 KB PDF).

The third in a series of Computing Research Association (CRA) Conferences on "Grand Research Challenges" in Computer Science and Engineering was held at the beautiful SeaScape Resort, Monterey Bay, California, on December 4-7, 2005. The GRC conference focused on the theme "Revitalizing Computer Architecture Research."

Driven by the promising outlook and serious challenges of the process technology, computer architects have an unprecedented opportunity to be innovative and creative. The purpose of the CRA GRC conference was to bring together researchers from academia and industry to brainstorm and to identify the new challenging research problems for the architecture research community to address in the next 10 years. The intent was to think outside of traditional "boxes" and beyond current trendy topics. Separation of computing and communication is no longer useful; differentiating between embedded and mainstream computing is no longer meaningful. Extreme mobility and highly compact form factors will likely dominate. A distributed peer-to-peer paradigm may replace the client-server model. New applications for recognition, mining, synthesis, and entertainment could be the dominant workloads. It was an opportune time for the computer architecture research community to spend a few days together to ponder these possibilities and formulate a grand new research agenda.

We were seeking scientists, educators, business people, futurists, and others who have some vision and understanding of the big challenges (and accompanying advances) that should shape the research agenda in this field over the next few decades. These meetings are not structured as traditional conferences with scheduled presentations, but rather as highly participatory meetings (like the "Gordon" conferences) exposing important themes and ideas. As such, this was not a conference for computer architecture specialists alone: We sought to convene a diverse group from a variety of fields and at all career stages­-we sought insight and vision wherever it may reside.

Attendance was limited to 50 people and was by invitation only. Those interested in attending the conference were asked to submit a two-page (or less) statement of one to three examples of a "grand research challenge" problem in computer architecture by August 12, 2005. The organizing committee invited prospective attendees based on the statements submitted.

John Shen, Nokia Research Center  (Co-Chair)
Mary Jane Irwin, Penn State University (Co-Chair)
Todd Austin, University of Michigan
Luiz Andre Barroso, Google
Susan Eggers, University of Washington
Elmootazbellah Elnozahy, IBM
Mark Horowitz, Stanford
Mike Johnson, Texas Instruments
Chuck Moore, AMD
Ravi Nair, IBM
Dave Patterson, University of California Berkeley
Justin Rattner, Intel
Anand Sivasubramaniam, Penn State University

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