Proceedings of the seventh Asia-Pacific conference on Computer systems architecture

Welcome to the 7th Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference! From inauspicious beginnings as a workshop designed to bring computer architects from around Australia together, this conference has grown into one with an international focus and papers from groups all over the Asia-Pacific area as well contributions from Europe. This year ACSAC'2002 remains part of the highly successful Australasian Computer Science Week - a federation of conferences from a wide spectrum of disciplines within computer science and engineering. However, from 2003 onwards, ACSAC will break away from ACSW every second year and be located in some other part of the Asia-Pacific area: ACSAC'2003 will be in Singapore.Papers in this proceedings focus on interconnection architectures, operating systems for distributed systems and reconfigurable systems and architectural enhancements to improve processor performance - with several papers discussing speed enhancements and one showing how power consumption can be reduced. One paper looks forward to next generation architectures and, demonstrating that computer architects understand that no architecture will work without software, there is one paper on parallel languages.All papers presented here received at least two reviews either from members of the program committee or others who agreed to help. The conference would not be possible without your efforts: thanks to you all from the programme chairs and the authors whose papers were improved by your comments.Organization of the ACSAC conference is always made easier by the efforts of the Australasian Computer Science Week organizing committee: for 2002, it was led by Ronald Pose (ACSW General Chair). He was supported by Shiranthi Ponniah (Local Arrangements Coordinator), Fran Boyce and Jenny Ekanayake (Finance) and Peter Nankivell (Webmaster).The Computer Science Association (CSA) welcomes all delegates to ACSW2002 at Monash University in Melbourne. CSA is proud of the continuing success of ACSW, the Australasian Computer Science Week. The week is the premier annual event in AustraLia and New Zealand to promote IT fundamentals. We believe strongly that IT research, as typified by the research presented at the conference, is essential for the future of our region. Government unfortunately often conflates IT fundamentals with IT skills. We should be constantly reminding Government and industry about the difference between IT fundamentals and IT skills.In the coming years, CSA is looking to increase its links with professional organisations worldwide. We are pleased that the Australian Computer Society is publishing this year's proceedings. We are looking to have the publications included in the ACM Digital Library. We look forward to a good future for IT research in Australia and New Zealand.