Christian Hochberger (editor) - Architecture of Computing Systems: 34th International Conference, ARCS 2021, Virtual Event, June 7–8, 2021, Proceedings

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The International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS) series has over 30 years of tradition reporting leading-edge research in computer architecture and operating systems. The conference was organized by the Special Interest Group on Architecture of Computing Systems of the GI (Gesellschaft fr Informatik e.V.) and ITG (Informationstechnische Gesellschaft im VDE), which held the financial responsibility for this ARCS edition. ARCS addresses the complete spectrum from fully integrated, self-powered embedded systems up to high-performance computing systems and provides a platform covering newly emerging and cross-cutting topics, such as autonomous and ubiquitous systems, reconfigurable computing and acceleration, neural networks, and artificial intelligence, as well as outlooks on future topics such as post-Moore architectures and organic computing.

The 34th edition of the conference (ARCS 2021) was planned when we all knew that the COVID-19 pandemic would still be at large during the conference dates (June 78 2021). Thus, we anticipated that international travel would still be a problem and decided to organize the conference as a virtual event. Yet, this brought a number of new and previously unfamiliar problems. Should we aim for prerecorded talks and then only have a live Q&A session or should we go for live presentations? Would there be enough attendance to foster lively discussions? What type of venue would attract the most people? How should we plan the social event?

Eventually, we decided to present the talks in live sessions because we believe that this is the best basis for discussions at the conference. In addition, we chose a venue that enabled people to walk around and freely choose other attendees to talk to. Although this cannot fully replace the real-world networking event that ARCS has been in the past, we hoped that all guests of the ARCS conference could meet interesting people and have fruitful discussions.

The motto for ARCS 2021 was inspired by a seminal paper from John Hennessy and Dave Patterson (J.L. Hennessy and D.A. Patterson: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture in Communications of the ACM 62.2 (2019), pp. 4860). In this article, they forecast a Cambrian explosion of novel computer architectures. We found this extremely suitable as a focus for the conference as it covers the different facets that are part of the ARCS community. Under this umbrella, all the various accelerator types that are currently explored fit as well as IoT architectures or HPC specific processor optimizations and the management of heterogeneous systems. Additionally, programming models and system concepts are well connected to the topic.

ARCS 2021 attracted 24 full submissions from authors in 10 countries worldwide, including Japan, Brazil, USA, and several European countries. Each submission was reviewed by a diverse and dedicated Program Committee. Most of the submissions got 4 or even 5 qualified reviews and 7 submissions received 3 reviews, leading to a total of 92 reviews. The Program Committee selected 12 submissions to be published in the proceedings, which corresponds to a 50% paper acceptance rate. The accepted papers cover a variety of topics from the ARCS core domains, including heterogeneous computing, memory optimizations, and system management. Thanks to our sponsor Springer, we were able to hand out a best paper and a best presentation award at the closing ceremony.

ARCS has a long tradition of hosting associated workshops. This year the 16th Workshop on Dependability and Fault Tolerance (VERFE 2021) was organized and we decided to include the accepted papers within the conference proceedings.

We thank the many individuals who contributed to ARCS 2021, in particular the members of the Program Committee and the additional external reviewers for their time and effort in carefully reviewing and judging the submissions. We further thank all authors for submitting their work to ARCS and presenting accepted papers. The workshop organization was coordinated by Carsten Trinitis, and the proceedings were compiled by Thilo Pionteck. Thanks go to these individuals and all the many other people who helped in the organization of ARCS 2021.