Next generation architectures and systems being deployed are characterized by high concurrency, low memory per-core, and multiple levels of hierarchy and heterogeneity. These characteristics bring out new challenges in energy efficiency, fault-tolerance and, scalability. It is commonly believed that software has the biggest share of the responsibility to tackle these challenges. In other words, this responsibility is delegated to the next generation programming models and their associated middleware/runtimes. This workshop focuses on different aspects of programming models such as task-based parallelism (Charm++, OCR, Habanero, Legion, X10, HPX, etc), PGAS (OpenSHMEM, UPC, CAF, Chapel, UPC++, etc.), BigData (Hadoop, Spark, etc), Deep Learning (Caffe, Microsoft CNTK, Google TensorFlow), directive-based languages (OpenMP, OpenACC) and Hybrid MPI+X, etc. It also focuses on their associated middleware (unified runtimes, interoperability for hybrid programming, tight integration of MPI+X, and support for accelerators) for next generation systems and architectures.

The ultimate objective of the ESPM2 workshop is to serve as a forum that brings together researchers from academia and industry working in the areas of programming models, runtime systems, compilation and languages, and application developers.