Preparations are well underway for the 2010 CASPER (Collaboration for
Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research) Workshop, to be
held at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA
from 16 to 20 August. We expect this to be an exciting and well
attended event, with a slate of speakers and attendees from the CASPER
community and from industry (Xilinx and nVidia).
Please register, and optionally submit a title and a short abstract
for a 20 minute presentation here:
http://casper.berkeley.edu/workshop_2010/
Please note the abstract deadline is considerably earlier than the
registration deadline.
Deadline for abstracts: 15 June 2010
Deadline for registration 31 July 2010 (or when filled)
Both new registrants, and those who have already registered, please
help us out by submitting your proposed talk title and a short plain
text abstract as soon as possible. This is very helpful for the
organizers to see how the workshop is shaping up and to balance the
program. The abstracts are published when submitted, so that potential
attendees can see what has already been submitted, and tune their
contributions accordingly. You can continue to edit your abstracts
after submission. (We had some early hiccups with the abstract
submission form, so those who have already submitted please check and
see if it's gone missing . . . sorry if you need to resubmit).
The registration fee is $150, reduced to $50 for students. This will
cover refreshments and lunches over the five days There is a separate
secure page linked from the above page for payment of the fee.
Registration is thus a two step process. Payment of the fee will
confirm your registration. Please note that there is a hard limit of
100 attendees, and the workshop will be closed when we have that
number confirmed.
A note on workshop structure: we plan to have talks, hands on
tutorials, as well as break out sessions and working groups. The first
day, Monday 16 August, will be dedicated to basic hands on tutorials,
with some talks on the took flow as appropriate. Advanced CASPERites
may choose to skip this day. The remaining days will consist of
intensive talks until just past lunch time, with the afternoon set
aside for hands on, working groups, and informal interaction.
Travel and hotel information is on the CASPER wiki and linked from the
registration page.
We are working on the possibility of need-based partial travel support
for student participants, and this will be announced, and requests
solicited, if and when confirmed.
CASPER 2010 Mission Statement
Attended by about 100 international astronomy digital signal
processing (DSP) experts, the annual meeting of the global CASPER
collaboration traditionally includes a review of the past year's
accomplishments and hands-on training for old hands and new recruits
alike. Historically CASPER DSP hardware has been FPGA-based, and the
2010 CfA workshop in particular aims to reach out to the wider DSP
community so as to set a foundation for a broadened CASPER mission.
The collaboration plans to explore opportunities in heterogeneous
computing, exploiting natural synergies between FPGAs, and other
platforms such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), fast multi-core
CPUs, high bandwidth coherent data storage and quasi-real time post-
processing. The mission of CASPER is to streamline, simplify, and
thereby accelerate the design of astronomy instrumentation by
promoting design reuse through the development of platform-
independent, open-source hardware and software.
Please feel free to forward this message to colleagues who may be
interested. We look forward to seeing you in Cambridge.
Jonathan Weintroub, Lincoln Greenhill, Jim Moran and the SOC
