SIGARCH Annual Report
July 1998 - June 1999
Submitted by: Jean-Loup Baer, SIGARCH Chair
Overview
The primary mission of SIGARCH is to be the forum where researchers and practitioners of computer architecture can exchange ideas. SIGARCH sponsors or co-sponsors the premier conferences in the field as well as a number of workshops. It publishes a quarterly newsletter and the proceedings of several conferences. It is financially strong with a fund balance of about 1 Million dollars.
Awards
The Eckert-Mauchly Award (co-sponsored with IEEE CS) is the most prestigious award in computer architecture. It was given this year to Professor James Smith from the
University of Wisconsin. Jim is well-known for his life time contributions to the design of supercomputers, the introduction of branch prediction mechanisms, and his studies on instruction level parallelism. The three ACM members who were part of the selection committee for 1998 were Dr. David Kuck (past winner), Dr. Forest Baskett (SGI) and Professor Mateo Valero (Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona).
As announced last year, SIGARCH has endowed an Award named after Maurice Wilkes. The second Maurice Wilkes Award was given to Professor Guri Sohi from the University of Wisconsin "for seminal contributions in the areas of high issue rate processors and instruction level parallelism."
Both awards were presented at ISCA 99 in Atlanta and Maurice Wilkes was on-hand
to present the Award to Guri.
Conferences
In addition to ISCA (Int. Symposium on Computer Architecture), SIGARCH sponsors
ICS (Int. Conference on Supercomputing) and co-sponsors SC (nee Supercomputing)
(with IEEE CS), ASPLOS (with SIGPLAN and SIGOPS), and SPAA (with SIGACT). It also co-sponsors a number of conferences or workshops such as IOPADS with other SIGs amongst which SIGACT, SIGPLAN, SIGOPS and SIGMETRICS as well as IEEE TC's and occasionally some IFIP WG.
SIGARCH plays a leadership role in organizing ISCA and ASPLOS as well as in the recruiting of general chairs and program committee chairs.
ISCA 99, the 26th, was part of FCRC in Atlanta, May 2-4. It was a very successful conference under the leaderships of Allan Gottlieb as general Chair and Bill Dally as Program Chair. ISCA 2000 will be in Vancouver, B.C., Canada with Alan Berenbaum as General Chair and Joel Emer as Program Chair. ISCA 2001 will be in Goteborg, Sweden with Per Stenstrom as General Chair.
ASPLOS 2000 will take place in the Boston-Cambridge area with Larry Rudolph as General Chair and Anoop Gupta as Program Chair.
SPAA 99 took place in San Malo, France in June with Gary Miller as General Chair and Vijaya Ramachandran as Program Chair.
ICS 99 took place in Rhodes, Greece also in June with Theodore Papatheodorou and Mateo Valero as General Co-chairs and Constantine Polychronopoulos as Program chair.
Travel Grants
SIGARCH annually gives travel grant awards to students who are planning on attending ISCA and ASPLOS. Twenty-four travel grants were given to students participating in ISCA 99 (same number as in the last two years). At the annual SIGARCH meeting, a motion to open travel grants to students who are not members of SIGARCH was defeated.
Publications
CAN (Computer Architecture News), SIGARCH's newsletter, is published 4 times a year. In addition the ISCA Proceedings form a special fifth issue. SIGARCH also
contributes to the publication of the ASPLOS Proceedings every other year. The newsletter consists of technical contributions, reports of panels, Internet nuggets (the most interesting or controversial articles from the comp.arch newsgroup),
book reviews, and call for papers. Proceedings of SC, SPAA and ICS are available
through the Member Plus program.
Finances
SIGARCH has a fund balance of about $1 Million. This appreciable balance was garnered through the successes of several recent SC conferences. Although the goal of conference organizers is to break even so that the conference registration fees reflect as accurately as possible the benefit of the conference to the attendees,
it is difficult not to make a slight profit because of the contingencies imposed by the Societies.
Membership
The bad news is that we continue to see a slight decline in membership (about 13% comparable to the overall 14% in decline over all SIGs). The good news is that we have a high retention rate.
Elections
A new slate of Officers was elected in June, namely Alan Beranbaum (Chair), Norm Jouppi (Vice-Chair), and Allan Gottlieb (Secretary-Treasurer). The Board of Directors consists of Jean-Loup Baer, Mark Hill, Mary-Jane Irwin, and Alan Smith.
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