ICS

We are pleased to welcome you to the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, 2004. Since 1987, ICS has been one of the leading forums on all aspects of high performance computing, including hardware, software and applications. We hope this, the 18th edition of ICS, will be as enjoyable and useful as its predecessors. The main event will also include invited lectures and two satellites workshops.In 1988, the 2nd International Conference on Supercomputing was held in Saint-Malo, the same location as this year's conference. In that year, 66 papers were accepted out of a total of 167 submitted, or 40%. The selection included papers by no fewer than eight members of the present program committee, including both program co-chairs and a contribution from the general chair.This year, the ICS program committee consisted of 35 members. Twenty-six of these members managed to attend the PC meeting, held in Chicago, on the 3rd of April, including members coming from as far away as Japan (1) and New Zealand (3). The program committee was more selective than in 1988, choosing only 35 papers out of 162 submissions, and including only 3 papers from members of the program committee out of 12.As is traditional, this conference comprises papers from a broad range of topics, including microarchitecture, software tools for microarchitecture, compilers, middleware for high performance, system analysis, performance analysis, distributed computing and high performance applications. For the first time, the selection procedure included a rebuttal process, giving the authors a chance to respond to comments made in the reviews before the program committee meeting. This addition greatly aided the selection process, first by making sure reviewers' claims would be carefully scrutinized, but more importantly, by allowing the organizers to identify the borderline papers and time to collect additional reviews. Thus the program committee was able to focus a larger proportion of the reviewing effort on those papers that required the most attention.The strong set of papers being presented at this conference is a direct result of the hard work of many people in addition to the program committee. Due to the chosen deadlines and the decision to allow rebuttals, more than 180 people had to write reviews in a very short time. The co-chairs are especially indebted to Craig Zilles and Pierre Salverda, who created and maintained the web site for submissions reviews and rebuttals, and to Doug Burger and Gem Naivar who made the local arrangements (from Texas!) for our meeting in Chicago.