SPAA

This volume consists of papers that were presented at the 20th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA'07), held on June 14-16, 2008, in Munich, Germany. It was sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) and organized in cooperation with the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). Financial support was provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Akamai, Intel, and Sun Microsystems.

The 36 regular presentations that appeared at the conference were selected by the program committee after an electronic discussion and a meeting of two days that took place at Sun Labs, Burlington, Massachusetts, on March 20-21. Of these papers, the paper "Utilizing Shared Data in Chip Multiprocessors with the Nahalal Architecture" by Zvika Guz, Idit Keidar, Avinoam Kolodny, and Uri Weiser was selected to receive the best paper award. Fourteen papers were selected by Jim Larus for the special track on "Hardware and Software Techniques for Multicore Programming".

The regular presentations were selected out of 128 submitted abstracts. The mix of selected papers reflects the unique nature of SPAA in bringing together the theory and practice of parallel computing. SPAA defines parallelism very broadly to encompass any computational device or scheme that can perform multiple operations or tasks simultaneously or concurrently. This year, the selection of papers was closer to SPAA's roots, in that technical papers included a large number of papers on parallel and multicore algorithms and architectures. The technical papers in this volume are to be considered preliminary versions, and authors are generally expected to publish polished and complete versions in archival scientific journals.

In addition to the regular presentations, this volume includes 13 brief announcements and the abstracts of 4 posters that were presented at the SPAA review sessions. The committee's decisions in accepting brief announcements and posters were based on the perceived interest of these contributions, with the goal that they serve as bases for further significant advances in parallelism in computing. Extended versions of the SPAA brief announcements and posters may be published later in other conferences or journals.

Finally, this year, there were 6 invited talks by Kunle Olukotun, Arnold Rosenberg, Leslie Valiant, Hagit Attiya, Charles Leiserson, and Burton Smith, to celebrate SPAA's 20 th anniversary.