The objective of this thematic session was to be a forum for exchanging ideas on how to tackle hardware related challenges such as the heterogeneity in technologies and the increase in the number of compute nodes which can cause serious congestion problems which pose major implications in terms of software layers that have to manage the hardware resources. While the system software community (including the programming models and runtime systems fields) has made considerable progress in providing more transparent support for managing large-scale deployments, the community is still far from attaining a highly efficient generic and portable support.

The aim of the session was clearly achieved thanks to the lively interaction of the audience.