News

SPEC International Performance Evaluation Workshop in Darmstadt unites researchers and practitioners

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) and the Databases and Distributed Systems Group (DVS) at Technische Universität Darmstadt will hold a workshop on 27 and 28 June in Darmstadt, Germany, to share ideas and experiences in the field of system performance evaluation.

The SPEC International Performance Evaluation Workshop (SIPEW 2008) will present 16 selected papers from industry and academia in five categories: system profiling, monitoring and power management; benchmarks and workload characterization; benchmarks, sizing and optimization; models for software performance engineering; and web services and service-oriented architectures. On the first day a keynote presentation, titled "Scheduling for Server Farms: Approaches and Open Problems" will be delivered by Mor Harchol-Balter, associate head in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. On the second day, Murray Woodside, a distinguished research professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, will deliver a keynote talk on "Performance Data and Data Models".

The program also includes two invited talks: "SAP Standard Application Benchmarks" by Dr. Ulrich Marquard, vice president at SAP AG; and "Characterization of SPECpower_ssj2008 Benchmark" by Anil Kumar and Larry Gray, senior staff engineers at Intel.

The workshop will be co-located with and will take place immediately after a SPEC meeting which will be attended by numerous representatives from across the hardware and software industry. "This is a unique opportunity for researchers to meet with industry practitioners to share and present their experiences, discuss challenges, and report on the latest developments in performance evaluation," says Walter Bays, SPEC president.

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Talk by Sriram Srinivasan in the Informatik-Kolloquium series

Sriram Srinivasan, University of Cambridge, UK
"Kilim: Isolation-typed actors for Java"

Tuesday 13.05.2008, 15:00
Room S2 02 / B002 (Robert-Piloty-Building)

Abstract:

It is not easy being a server-side developer: not only is it tough to split ones attention between concurrent and distributed programming paradigms, the solution space for concurrency is rife with problems — threads are heavyweight, and shared-memory with locks is extremely error prone.

This talk describes Kilim, a Java framework to revisit all these solutions from the ground up. It features: (i) ultra-lightweight threads (a million of them on a modest JVM) obtained by CPS transformation and (ii) an isolation-aware messaging framework. The lessons learnt are applicable to all mainstream languages.

Prof. Buchmann elected member of the ICDE Steering Committee

Since the last edition of the International Conference on Data Engineering (24th ICDE, which took place in Cancun, Mexico), Prof. Alejandro Buchmann has been elected member of its permanent Steering Committee till December 2011. The main function of the StC is to select the organizers of future ICDE conferences, as well as monitor their progress and provide support to the organizers, always following its bylaws. The next, 25th, ICDE will take place in Shanghai, China, whereas in 2010 it will be located in Los Angeles, USA. ICDE is sponsored by the Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) of the IEEE Computer Society.

Upcoming conferences

We would like to put the following upcoming conferences to your attention:

ICDE 2008 24th International Conference on Data Engineering April 7-12, Cancún, México General Co-chair: Prof. A. Buchmann

SIPEW 2008 SPEC International Performance Evaluation Workshop June 27-28, Darmstadt, Germany Paper Submission: March 14, 2008 General Co-chair: Prof. A. Buchmann Call for Papers

DEBS 2008 2nd International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems July 2-4, Rome, Italy Abstract Submission: March 9, 2008 Paper Submission: March 15, 2008 Program Co-chair: Prof. A. Buchmann Call for Papers

DVS group members receive SPECtacular awards

On January 30th at SPEC's annual meeting in San Francisco, Kai Sachs and Samuel Kounev were awarded the SPECtacular awards for outstanding contributions to SPEC in 2007. They were honored by their SPEC colleagues - engineers and researchers in the computer industry and in academia - for excellent work and contributions to the organization.