International Journal of Parallel Programming, Vol. 33, No. 5, October 2005 (© 2005) DOI: 10.1007/s10766-005-7300-1

Message from the Guest Editors Welcome to this special issue, a showcase of some of the most notable papers which were presented at the 16th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (Simp´osio Brasileiro de Arquitetura de Computadores e Processamento de Alto Desempenho SBAC-PAD 2004) in Foz do Iguac¸u, Brazil, in October 2004. SBAC-PAD is an international annual conference, started in 1987, which has continuously presented an overview of new developments, applications, and trends in parallel and distributed computing technologies. SBAC-PAD is open to faculty members, researchers, specialists and graduate students around the world. Last year, it was promoted by the Brazilian Computer Society, organized in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, sponsored by CRAY, NEC, CNPq, FINEP and CAPES, co-sponsored by IFIP, and organized by UFRGS and USP. As part of the original selection, the SBAC-PAD 2004 conference Program Committee had the notably difficult task of selecting 32 papers out the 93 submissions we received at the time. Each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers (half were reviewer by 4). For this special issue, we, the guest editors, in consultation with the SBAC-PAD 2004 Program Committee, selected five papers, based upon their overall quality and direct relevance to the spirit of the conference. We then invited the authors to present an extended version of their work. Each was then subjected to a strict peer review and sent to each of the original reviewers in addition to one extra expert in the field. We provided the last stage of quality control and are proud to present to you the following five papers. These include a variety of topics, ranging from architecture design to applications and performance evaluation: 1. Rodolfo Azevedo, Sandro Rigo, Marcus Bartholomeu, Guido Araujo, Cristiano Araujo, and Edna Barros, in “The ArchC Architecture Description Language and Tools,” describe a new processor 451 0885-7458/05/1000-0451/0 © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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architecture description language, the goal of which is to provide verification and experimentation with new architectures, while maintaining easy interfacing with other systems. Debora R. Roberti, Roberto P. Souto, Haroldo F. de Campos Velho, Gervasio A. Degrazial, and Domenico Anfossi present their paper entitled “Parallel Implementation of a Lagrangian Stochastic Model for Pollutant Dispersion,” in which they analyze the parallel implementation of a model of airborne pollutant dispersion. The parallel simulation uses the MPI message-passing communication library. The paper by Edson Toshimi Midorikawa, Helio Marci de Oliveira, and Jean Marcos Laine, identify the difficulty to accurately evaluate MPI program performance as a major problem in computer clusters. They propose a new methodology in their paper entitled “PEMPIs: a New Methodology for Modeling and Prediction of MPI Programs Performance.” Onur Mutlu, Hyesoon Kim, David N. Armstrong, and Yale N. Patt show a new method for the prediction of the usefulness of speculative memory references in their paper “Using the First-Level Caches as Filters to Reduce the Pollution Caused by Speculative Memory References,” Their proposed technique ensures that speculative memory references bring data only into the first-level caches rather than all levels in the cache hierarchy. It yields speedups of up to 10%. Yue Luo, Lizy K. John, and Lieven Eeckhout present a new method to speed-up and improve the accuracy of cache simulations in their paper “SMA: A Self-Monitored Adaptive Cache Warm-Up Scheme for Microprocessor Simulation.” They demonstrate how their Self Monitored Adaptive (CMA) warm-up technique can significantly improve the performance of the cache warm-up period while retaining CPI results similar to previous simulation methods.

We would like to thank Alex Nicolau, the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Parallel Programming, for giving us a chance to host this Special Issue, the Program Committee of SABC-PAD 2004, for their kind and expert work in evaluating these papers, and of course the authors for their participation and for making this outstanding issue possible. Jean-Luc Gaudiot, Siang Wun Song Guest Editors