The 2nd International Workshop on Extreme Scale Parallel Architectures and Systems (ESPAS) will bring together researchers working on Experimental Infrastructures for Exascale Research and Development. Work in this area includes investigation of experimental components and systems for extreme-scale, simulation methods and tools targeting extreme scale, benchmarking, workload generation tools, and other related experimental systems and methods.

The workshop encourages publication and discussion of disruptive approaches to address the challenges of research and development for systems that do not exist as-of-yet. Another aspect of equal importance is the creation of a palette of scientific methods and experimental infrastructures (in software and/or hardware) to evaluate novel ideas (technologies, algorithms, systems). Some of the pressing issues that need to be addressed in this context are scalability of experiments, validation/extrapolation of scientific results, and characterization of expected workloads and their synthetic generation. Given the high cost of ownership and the limited access to the top-end of parallel systems, it is important to pursue experimental architectures and systems comprising of off-the-shelf components, configured, modified, or enhanced in such a way that they can provide insight into aspects of exascale systems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Testbed design and evaluation
Experimental clusters/systems targeting extreme scale
Workload generation and benchmarking
Analytical modelling and simulation of systems
Techniques for extrapolation of experimental results to extreme-scale
Validation of projection/extrapolation techniques
Suitability/adaptability of commercial, off-the-shelf components (COTS)
Cost, energy, performance and resilience
Methodologies and tools

Accepted papers of the workshop will be considered for publication in a special issue of a top class journal.