Introduction

Disaggregation is an emerging compute paradigm that splits existing monolithic servers into a number of consolidated single-resource pools that communicate over a fast interconnect. This model decouples individual hardware resources, including tightly coupled ones such as processors and memory, and enables the creation of logical compute platforms with flexible and dynamic hardware configurations. The concept of disaggregation is driven by various recent trends in computation. From an application perspective, the increasing importance of data analytics and machine learning workloads in HPC centers brings unprecedented need for memory capacity, which is in stark contrast with the growing imbalance in the peak compute-to-memory capacity ratio of traditional system board based server platforms where memory modules are co-located with processors. At the hardware front, the proliferation of heterogeneous, special purpose computing elements promotes the need for configurable compute platforms, while at the same time, the increasing maturity of optical interconnects elevates the prospects of distance independence in networking infrastructure. The workshop intends to explore various aspects of resource disgregation and their implications for high performance computing, both in dedicated HPC centers as well as in cloud environments.