News about SIGMicro

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           SIGMICRO TO PROVIDE FREE ACCESS TO AN S/390 MAINFRAME
                       AND AN IA-64 FOR RESEARCHERS

An important emerging industry trend is that IT resources will increasingly
be provided over the internet, possibly replacing in-house IT shops in the
end.  Along the same trend on the side of academic research, ACM SIGMICRO
will be providing to microarchitecture researchers free access to machines
with some uniquely interesting architectures. You can do any research you
want with these machines, or you can choose to just get a hands-on
experience to learn about the architectures, to plan your research. Thanks
to generous donations from IBM and HP, an IBM S/390 (zSeries) mainframe
(running z/VM which lets you have your own virtual multiprocessor
machine(s) with Linux or other guest OS), as well as an HP Itanium system
(running Linux), will be available in the second half of this year to
SIGMICRO researchers worldwide, over the internet. We encourage you to ask
for accounts on these machines on-line on our Web site (described below).
Because of the limited number of available accounts, the requests will be
subject to a review. There is a benefit to entering your preliminary
requests early.

The long-term goal of SIGMICRO is to freely provide hardware and software
research resources to deserving microarchitecture researchers worldwide,
with the help of the industry.

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NEW SIGMICRO WEB SITE

SIGMICRO is happy to announce its new Web site on microarchitecture
research and education, which was developed through a year-long effort. The
goal of our Web site  is to advance the state of the art in  microprocessor
design by:
   - Disseminating information from academic and industrial sources,
   - Providing access to computing resources for microarchitecture research,
   - Encouraging interaction between researchers, educators, and students.

Some of the methods for achieving this include:
   - A dynamic database that allows members to submit content to the site via
     Web forms,
   - An annotated Web bibliography,
   - A portal system to computing resources the site actively recruits from
     leading-edge computer companies, and
   - A set of bulletin boards targeted to specific communities.

Notable among the features in the new Web site is the Purdue University
NETCARE system, which gives researchers access to a comprehensive set of
architecture research and simulation tools, as well as an opportunity to
run these tools over the Web. The SIGMICRO Web site also includes a
database of graduating students. Graduate students in microarchitecture-
related fields, including advanced compiler areas, are encouraged to add an
entry to this database about their own theses, to make the community of
their peers (and potential employers) aware of their work.

The new SIGMICRO Web site has been launched at the following URL. We
cordially invite you to take a look:

   http://www.acm.org/sigmicro

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ABOUT ACM SIGMICRO (http://www.acm.org/sigmicro)

The ACM Special Interest Group on Microarchitectural Research, SIGMICRO,
specializes in computer microarchitecture, and especially in features
permitting instruction-level parallelism and their related implications on
compiler design. For the past 33 years, the annual MICRO conference
(co-sponsored by SIGMICRO) has been a key forum for presenting major
breakthroughs in computing architecture, and has established itself as the
premier conference on instruction level parallelism. The SIGMICRO
newsletter is published once a year as the conference proceedings and is
included as a benefit of membership in the SIG.

SIGMICRO's long term goals toward furthering the state of the art in the
field include:

   - Continuing quality improvements to the MICRO conference series
   - Becoming a Web resource, for teaching and research fields related to
     microarchitecture
   - Establishing new student awards, to foster interest in leading edge
     microarchitecture research
   - Providing computing research resources to microarchitecture researchers
     worldwide, with the help of the industry.

ACM SIGMICRO is the professional organization to belong to if you are a
microarchitect, microprogrammer, advanced compiler designer, or a
researcher/developer of superscalar, pipelined, or fine-grain parallel
computer architectures, or if you are interested in learning more about
such microarchitecture topics.

                                 Officers
                                 --------
                        Chair: Kemal Ebcioglu, IBM
          Vice-Chair: Steve Beaty, Metro State College of Denver
        Secretary/Treasurer: Ed Gehringer, North Carolina State U.

                   SIGMICRO Web Site Steering Committee
                   ------------------------------------
                       Renato Figueiredo, Purdue U.
                          Jose Fortes, Purdue U.
                   Ed Gehringer, North Carolina State U.
                     Augustus Uht, U. of Rhode Island