The Amrita Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Bengaluru organized a two-day workshop on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing during March 15-16, 2013.

At the same time, the Amrita Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Coimbatore organized its third edition the National Workshop on Computer Vision and Image Processing.

“Our workshop was focused on computer system architectures, parallel architectures and parallel processing, and brought researchers up to speed on the latest advances. Hands-on training on architectural tools and CUDA environment for programming on GPGPUs was provided,” noted organizers from Bengaluru.

Over 30 delegates participated. Dr. S. K. Nandy, Professor from IISc, delivered the key note address on Hybrid Computing. “We should now focus on overcoming the utilization wall through temporal dimness and spatial dimness,” he pointed out during his lecture. Researchers from BITS Pilani came online to lead a session on Compiler Optimization and Support for Multicore Architecture.

Meanwhile, organizers at Coimbatore were a little amazed with the overwhelming response to their workshop.

“We were initially expecting participation from about 75 delegates only. But nearly 120 delegates registered, both researchers and PG students,” they shared.

Most sessions at this workshop were led by Amrita faculty. Dr. Latha Parameswaran spoke on Image Processing – Introduction and Applications, inspiring student aspirants to consider research in this field. Subsequently, Dr. K.A. Narayanankutti lectured on Image Foresting Transform, providing a detailed overview of transform domain techniques and current research ongoing in the field of graph theory related to image processing.

Hands-on sessions were the highlights of both workshops.

At Bengaluru, delegates learned about ASIC front-end implementation flow for making CPU chips. Ms. Bhargavi Upadhyay of Amrita provided an introduction to GEM5, a simulator for Multicore. Architectural simulators and simple scalars kept them busy. GPGPU architecture and heterogeneous computing was also highlighted. A panel discussion on research opportunities in Architecture and High Performance Computing wrapped up the proceedings.

Meanwhile at Coimbatore, hands-on sessions on MATLAB were supplemented by demos of various projects ongoing and completed at the new Amrita-CTS Innovation lab. The projects made use of advanced equipment such as a Kinect, an IP Camera and BeagleBoard. Dr. Kumar Rajamani, formerly at Amrita and now at GE, Bengaluru provided hands-on training on medical image analysis.

March 27, 2013
Amrita Schools of Engineering, Bengaluru and Coimbatore