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Mardi Gras Conference 2008 - Distributed Programming Abstractions Workshop
Introduction
The issues facing the Grid applications community today are very
different from those faced five years ago. It is generally agreed that
the major early barrier to Grid-enabling applications was the status
of the infrastructure. In spite of much worldwide effort, the number
of complex scientific applications that can effectively utilize
distributed infrastructure remains minuscule. There remain only a
handful of applications that have been designed a priori for
distributed systems. The pressing question is: why in spite of the
resources that have gone into the global Grid effort, do the previous
two statements remain true? Are these symptomatic of a silent killer?
Also of concern however, is that the majority of scientists retain the
same mental model of programming applications for distributed
infrastructure, as they did for isolated serial and parallel
computers. Thanks to many years of experience and research, it is
relatively easy to determine which algorithms and data-structures
should be used such that application codes scale well across a single
platform. But how should scientific applications - both
compute-intensive and data-intensive - be programmed such that they
are easily able to utilize a distributed infrastructure? How can
computer scientists aid the design and implementation of applications
that shields such applications from future changes in computing
environments?
Based on these key questions, the Distributed Programming Abstractions (DPA) theme was launched at NeSC/eSI in Edinburgh, UK as a year long theme, to provide a better understanding of how distributed infrastructure can be used more effectively for developing Grid applications. A unique feature of this theme is the strong coupling between distributed programming models, techniques and abstraction on the one hand and real applications on the other. The DPA theme brings together application/computational scientists from different domains along with computer scientists to first explore programming models and abstractions in detail and then apply them to specific application classes and domain.
The DPA Theme will have a one-day meeting at the Mardi Gras conference
on the 30 January, 2008 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The primary
motivation is to try to enable the many US based participants who have
expressed interest in the theme and would like to contribute, but have
not been able to make the trip to Edinburgh. In addition, given the
anticipated large attendence at the Mardi Gras conference, this
presents a good opportunity to solicit ideas and suggestions from a
broader community.
Submissions
Papers are invited on topics related to the DPA theme and will be published in the proceedings of the Mardi Gras Conference, and archived in the ACM digital library.
Draft Schedule for Submissions
Submission: Oct 10, 2007
Notification: Nov 7, 2007
Final Papers: Nov 28, 2007
Conference: Jan 30 - Feb 2, 2008
Abstracts for Invited Talks will be due: Nov 10, 2007
Workshop Schedule: TBD
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