Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 12th ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP'07). This past year has been an exciting one for the field. The abrupt switch to multi-core designs for commodity microprocessors has transformed parallel computing from a fringe technology to one on the critical path for the success of products ranging from game consoles to supercomputers. The road ahead is full of challenges with increasing interest in heterogeneous architectures and the impending arrival of many-core microprocessors. The mission of this symposium is to serve as a forum for presenting new ideas ranging from the theoretical foundations of parallel programming, to programming models, algorithms, and software for parallel systems. PPoPP provides researchers and practitioners an opportunity to share their diverse perspectives. The call for papers attracted 65 submissions from Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. The program committee accepted 22 papers on topics ranging from theory to practice. This year, PPoPP includes a poster session whose aim is to broaden participation and increase the exchange of ideas without sacrificing the symposium's single-track format. The program also includes keynote speeches by Jesse Fang and Andrew Chien, along with a panel on transactions moderated by Maurice Herlihy. For the first time, PPoPP'07 includes companion workshops that provide an opportunity to learn about topics in greater depth. We hope that you find the program thought provoking and that you value the symposium as an opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues from institutions around the world.