Steve Vinoski's Blog

The Twelfth ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop will take place on September 28, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. See the call for papers for more details.

It’s a satellite event of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), September 25–27, 2013. http://www.icfpconference.org/icfp2013/.

The PC is chaired by Laura M. Castro, and I’m serving as the workshop chair and as part of the program committee. We’re looking forward to receiving many excellent paper submissions from the ever-growing Erlang community.

The following is excerpted from the full Call for Chapters on REST:

REST has gained popularity not only as a lightweight approach for Web Service development, but it also often used to denote a loosely coupled and Web-friendly approach to design Service-Oriented Architectures. In this book we gather contributions on applying REST beyond public Web services (e.g., in pervasive computing applications, cloud computing environments and integrated enterprise architectures) and on results of recent research studies for doing so. The goal is to go beyond the basic understanding of what REST is about as an architectural style and collect emerging and established design patterns to provide valuable guidance for the reader. The book will both give a clear, principled description of REST and show how it has made an impact in the state of the practice as well as provide an outlook on ongoing research advances. Readers will find a good starting point for making sense of REST, its design constraints, advantages and disadvantages, as well as a broad collection of novel practical application case studies where using REST has made a difference. The book is intended for service designers, information systems architects and anyone interested in learning the current state of research and application of the REST architectural style.

Please see the full call for details. I look forward to helping review your submissions for this book, especially from those of you focused on submitting interesting RESTful application case studies.

LaME is an interactive venue for exposing, evaluating, and developing programming language support for concurrency. This workshop provides a forum for the proposal and discussion of creative ideas that spur the development of innovative or improved concurrency models, languages, run-time systems, libraries and tools for multicore programming.

Space at the workshop is limited. We can ensure admission only to those submitting accepted position papers, programming challenge solutions, or other presentations.

The full paper deadline is now past, but we still solicit contributions of the following two forms, by May 20, 2012, at EasyChair:

1. Position papers (of up to 2 pages) describing ongoing work of attendees. Position papers will be reviewed for scope and relevance, and distributed to all attendees before the workshop. Attendees submitting position papers relevant to the workshop sessions on open issues in LaME may be invited to present brief (two-slide) synopses of their ideas and work on the following. (Authors should indicate which if any session their position papers address.)

   • Type Systems, including those for isolation, state, and effects
   • Intermediate program representations, including those supporting optimizations across tasks, memory locality
   • Extensible Libraries, including DSL support, coordination frameworks
   • Asynchronous programming, including IO, events, reactive programing
   • Heterogeneous systems, including integrated GPU and FPGA support, NUMA-awareness
2. Solutions to the LaME’12 programming challenge, described below. A session at the workshop will be devoted to brief presentations of solutions and their implications for the design and implementation of programming languages and parallel program development.

Programming Challenge

We solicit solutions to all or part of the following challenge, designed to showcase the expressiveness of different parallel language abstractions. The challenge is in two parts, one algorithmic and one engineering parallelism into a real-world context. Solutions may target either or both parts.

Solutions should include source code (ideally complete, but this is not required) as well as a short paper discussing the benefits and drawbacks of the approach. Comparisons to alternative approaches are welcome.

While the primary focus of this challenge is on expressiveness of the language, library or other abstractions used in the solution, evaluations showing the scalability and performance of the proposed approach are encouraged to show the performance that can be achieved with the approach.

The paper should be at most 4 pages. Code and papers will not be formally published, but will be archived on the LaME website. Solutions to the challenge problem will be presented and discussed at a workshop session.

Part A: Parallel Algorithms

The first challenge involves expressing algorithms cleanly. Prospective solutions will implement one or more of the benchmarks from the Problem Based Benchmark Suite. This open source suite describes a number of common real-world problems in terms of the function they implement and not the particular algorithm or code they use, and are thus a useful way to compare different programming languages, methodologies, and algorithm designs.

A description of the problems in the benchmark suite, together with sample implementations and sample inputs, is available at:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guyb/pbbs/

Part B: Parallelism in Context

The second challenge involves putting parallelism into a real-world context. While expressing the core of an algorithm is important, equally important is getting the data from the world, into an algorithm, and back out into the world. Desirable characteristics include code that is short, clear, and efficient.

Prospective solutions will show how to get parallel data from some public source, process it in parallel, and display the output in some meaningful way. The processing itself may be a solution to Part A or it may be any other parallel algorithm. Data sources to consider include Tim Bray’s Wide Finder and Wide Finder 2 benchmarks or one of the research-quality data sets described here:

https://bitly.com/bundles/hmason/1

However, any public data source may be used.

Organizing Committee

• Jonathan Aldrich (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Paulo Marques (University of Coimbra)
• Bruno Cabral (University of Coimbra)
• Néstor Catañho (University of Madeira)
• Doug Lea (State University of New York at Oswego)

Program Chair: Doug Lea (State University of New York at Oswego)

Program Committee

• Robert Bocchino (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Brian Goetz (Oracle)
• Philipp Haller (TypeSafe and EPFL)
• Mark Miller (Google)
• Simon Peyton-Jones (Microsoft)
• Vivek Sarkar (Rice University)
• Steve Vinoski (Basho Technologies)

LaME is an interactive venue for exposing, evaluating, and developing programming language support for concurrency. This workshop provides a forum for the proposal and discussion of creative ideas that spur the development of innovative or improved concurrency models, languages, run-time systems, libraries and tools for multicore programming.

We solicit contributions in any of three forms, at EasyChair:

1. Regular papers (of up to 8 pages) reporting mature or ongoing work in relevant foundational and theoretical aspects of concurrent programming, languages, tools, frameworks, case studies, and practical experience. Selected papers peer reviewed by the Program Committee will be presented at the workshop and included in the ACM Digital Library.

2. Position papers (of up to 2 pages) describing ongoing work of attendees. Position papers will be reviewed for scope and relevance, and distributed to all attendees before the workshop.

3. Solutions to the LaME’12 programming challenge (to be issued April 15, 2012). A session at the workshop will be devoted to brief presentations of solutions and their implications for the design and implementation of programming languages and parallel program development.

Important dates

Organizing Committee

• Jonathan Aldrich (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Paulo Marques (University of Coimbra)
• Bruno Cabral (University of Coimbra)
• Néstor Catañho (University of Madeira)
• Doug Lea (State University of New York at Oswego)

Program Chair

• Doug Lea (State University of New York at Oswego)

Program Committee

• Robert Bocchino (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Brian Goetz (Oracle)
• Philipp Haller (TypeSafe and EPFL)
• Mark Miller (Google)
• Simon Peyton-Jones (Microsoft)
• Vivek Sarkar (Rice University)
• Steve Vinoski (Basho Technologies)

IEEE Internet Computing is soliciting papers for a special issue on Virtualization.

Final submissions due: 1 July 2012
Publication date: March/April 2013

Please email the guest editors a brief description of the article you plan to submit by 15 June 2012.

One of the most famous adages in computer science is that “any problem in computer science can be solved by an extra level of indirection.” Increasingly, that level of indirection takes the form of virtualization, where a resource’s consumers are provided with a virtual rather than physical version of that resource. This layer of indirection has helped address a multitude of problems, including efficiency, security, high availability, elasticity, fault containment, mobility, and scalability.

In the past several years virtualization has gone mainstream, and more and more resources are virtualizable. Although virtual machines are the most obvious example, others include desktop sharing (VNC), virtual networks, virtual storage, and many more. All these have an enormous impact on Internet computing. A key recent use of virtualization is to enable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. Virtualization lets producers efficiently support many tenants while strongly isolating them from each other, and consumers to be isolated from the specifics of providers’ physical capacity, allowing, for example, virtual machines to move between different computers and even clouds. This special issue seeks articles from both industry and academia that discuss the application and development of virtualization in the Internet computing space. Topics include:

• cloud computing;
• virtual networks;
• storage-area networks;
• remote desktops;
• security;
• performance (in a network context); and
• migration of virtual environments.

Editors’ note: We encourage submissions from both academic and industrial practitioners, especially as they pertain to open source tools or products, but content must have technical merit, not be an advertisement.

Questions? Contact Guest Editors Fred Douglis and Orran Krieger.

All submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words, focused on Internet technologies and implementations. All manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IC’s international readership—primarily system and software design engineers. We do not accept white papers, and we discourage strictly theoretical or mathematical papers. To submit a manuscript, please log on to ScholarOne to create or access an account, which you can use to log on to IC’s Author Center and upload your submission.