ANCHOR 2006 Advanced Networking and Communications Hardware Workshop http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/anchor Held in conjunction with the 33rd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2006) Boston, MA, June 17-21, 2006

Organizers: v Taskin Kocak University of Central Florida v Gokhan Memik Northwestern University v Tilman Wolf University of Massachusetts Amherst

Program Committee: v Brad Calder, UCSD v Maria Gabrani, IBM Research – Zurich v Andreas Herkersdorf, TU Munchen v Mark Heinrich, UCF v Dirk Hoenicke, IBM T.J. Watson v Bill Mangione-Smith, Quantum Intellectual Property v Steve Melvin, Zytek Communications v Christian Sauer, Infineon

Workshop Overview:

The rapid expansion of networking applications and data traffic is leading to new specialized network component designs that can keep up with the growing field of networking and communications. Network component design becomes more challenging as performance and usage of communication networks increase. This workshop focuses on hardware architecture design approaches for packet-switched networks. The workshop aims at providing a forum for scientists and engineers from academia and industry to discuss their latest research on emerging network services. There is a growing interest in extensible networks, overlay networks, and grid computing, and higher layer processing built in hardware can effectively support these networks and computational approaches. This year's workshop will be looking for contributions that can benefit these communities.

Workshop Topics:

Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

- Switch and router architectures (including optical and fiber channel networks)

- Communications and network processors

- Co-processors (classification, search engine, traffic manager, etc.)

- Specialized offload engines (protocol offload engines, I/O adapters, etc.)

- Architectures for security applications

- Architectures for processor-memory interconnection

- Hardware accelerators for emerging network services (overlay, extensible, grid computing, etc.)

- Application-specific designs (compression, QoS, etc.)

- Power-efficient architectures

- High-level software for networking hardware

Submission Guidelines:

- Submit a 200-word abstract including title and complete author list in email (plain text preferred) to anchor@ece.northwestern.edu by March 24^th, 2006.

- Submit a 6000-word manuscript in email (pdf or ps format) to anchor@ece.northwestern.edu by March 31^st, 2006.

Notifications will be sent out on April 28^th. The final versions of the papers will be due May 22^nd, 2006.