Welcome to ASAP 2009

The 20th IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors. This year's event takes place in the historic city of Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The history of the event traces back to the International Workshop on Systolic Arrays, organized in 1986 in Oxford, UK. It later developed into the International Conference on Application Specific Array Processors. With its current title, it was organized for the first time in Chicago, USA in 1996. Since then it has alternated between Europe and North-America.

The conference will cover the theory and practice of application-specific systems, architectures and processors. Areas for application-specific computing are many and varied. Some sample application areas include information systems, signal and image processing, multimedia systems, communication, high-speed networks, sensor networks, compression, graphics, cryptography, and many areas of computational science. Aspects of application-specific computing that are of interest include, but are not limited to:

Application-specific systems: network computing, special-purpose systems, performance evaluation, design languages, compilers, operating systems, nanocomputing systems and applications, hardware/software integration and rapid prototyping.

Application-specific architectures: special-purpose designs, design methodology, CAD tools, fault tolerance, specifications and interfaces, networks-on-a-chip, hardware/software co-design, processor arrays, SoC, superscalar, multithreaded, VLIW and EPIC architectures.

Application-specific processors: digital signal processing, computer arithmetic, reconfigurable/custom computing, implementation methodologies, new technologies, fine-grain parallelism, FPGAs,low-power designs and asynchronous hardware.

We especially encourage submissions in the following three areas:

• Bioinformatics and computational biology — life sciences present a host of interesting problems that can benefit from application-specific solutions.
• Computational finance — the financial community has significant needs for high performance computing.
• Architecturally diverse systems — systems that use varied computing resources such as FPGAs, GPUs, Cell processors, etc.

The conference venue in 2009 is Boston, Massachusetts, which is a wonderful city to visit in its own right, with many sights worth seeing. This vibrant, thriving city is renowned for its cultural facilities, world-class educational institutions, as well as its place at the forefront of American history. The dates of the conference coincide with the Tall Ships 2009 event.