Guest Editorial: Computing Frontiers

Computing Frontiers is a forum where researchers meet to exchange ideas in all areas of Computer Science. While its roots are in computer systems research, Computing Frontiers has diversified and it is now closer to an interdisciplinary forum. Its main focus is on giving exposure to innovative and visionarywork in the broad field of Computer Science and Engineering. The 2011 edition of the conference covered research in awide range of topics including processor andmemory architecture, quantum computing, parallel applications, dynamic binary translation, and fault tolerant design. From all the accepted work, we selected the top four articles for an extended publication in this edition. In “Emerging Architectures Enable to Boost Massively Parallel Data Mining using Adaptive SparseGrids,”AlexanderHeinecke andDirk Pfluger present a parallel implementation for the sparse grid algorithms using the vectorization and streaming capabilities of both CPUs and GPUs. The authors target state-of-the-art processors from leading vendors. On a hybrid CPU/GPU system the authors achieve an impressive 188x speedup for single precision operations. In “Addressing GPU On-chip Shared Memory Bank Conflicts Using Elastic Pipeline,” Chunyang Gou and Georgi N. Gaydadjiev propose optimizations to the GPU pipeline as to avoid the on-chip shared-memory bank conflicts. With this technique the authors are able to improve the performance by up to 21%.