Foreword

The shift towards modern computing poses challenges for researchers and engineers in both hardware and software area. Computer platforms are multi-core architectures and every new technology generation increases the number of transistors. Computer architects have to establish computational structures that can transform the increase in transistors into an equal increase in computational performance efficiency. The multi-core architecture requires runtime systems to support parallel execution, the productive expression and efficient exploitation of parallelism. Parallel programming evolves to utilize tens of cores now and will evolve to support hundreds of them in the near future. Many/multi-core architecture with hundreds of cores will change the memory organizations of computer system to avoid bottleneck of performance. There is a need to design effective programming techniques and operating system concepts to fulfil all possibilities given by massive multi-core architectures. Despite of CPU oriented architectures reconfigurable computing (RC) is gaining popularity in many different domains. The main advantage of such systems is that they can adapt to static and dynamic application requirements better than those with fixed hardware. The special MIXDES session dedicated to High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation is devoted to the challenges of modern embedded architectures and computation techniques. The special session is supported by HiPEAC network (www.hipeac.net) and it is addressed to establish HiPEAC activity in Poland.