Call For Papers

      Workshop on Communication Architecture for Clusters (CAC '03)

                    To be held in Conjunction with
     Int'l Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS '03)


     Nice Acropolis Convention Center, Nice, France  April 22-26, 2003

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 Postscript and PDF versions of this CFP may be obtained from the World
            Wide Web: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~cac
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THEME:

The availability of commodity PCs/workstations and high-speed networks
(Local Area Networks and System Area Networks) at low prices enabled
the development of low-cost clusters. These clusters are being
targeted for support of traditional high-end computing applications as
well as emerging applications, especially those requiring
high-performance servers.  Designing high-performance and scalable
clusters for these emerging applications requires design and
development of high-performance communication and I/O subsystems,
low-overhead programming environment support and support for Quality
of Service (QoS).  New user-level communication protocol standards
such as Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) and InfiniBand
Architecture (IBA) are providing exciting ways to design
high-performance communication and I/O architectures for clusters.

A large number of research groups from academia, industry, and
research labs are currently engaged in the above research directions.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and
practitioners working in the areas of communication, I/O, and
architecture to discuss state-of-the-art solutions as well as future
trends for designing scalable, high-performance, and cost-effective
communication and I/O architectures for clusters.

The first two workshops in this series (CAC '01 and CAC '02) were held
in conjunction with IPDPS conferences, and they were very successful.
The CAC '03 workshop plans to continue this tradition.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

Topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to:

1. Router/switch, network, and network-interface architecture for
   supporting efficient point-to-point communication, collective
   communication, and I/O at intra-cluster and inter-cluster levels.

2. Design, development, and implementation of communication protocols
   (GM, VIA, TCP/IP, etc) on different networking and interconnect
   technologies (such as Myrinet, Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand, Quadrics,
   TCP Offload Engine, etc.).

3. High-performance implementation of different programming layers
   (Message Passing Interface (MPI), Distributed Shared Memory such
   as TreadMarks, Get/Put, Global Arrays, sockets, etc.) and File
   Systems (such as PVFS and DAFS).

4. Communication and architectural issues related to switch
   organization, flow control, congestion control, routing and
   deadlock-handling, load balancing, reliability, and QoS support.

5. Strategies, algorithms, and protocols for management of communication
   resources, including topology discovery, hot update/replacement of
   components, dynamic reconfigurations, etc.

6. Performance evaluation and tools for different application areas,
   including interprocessor communication and I/O, etc.

Results of both theoretical and practical significance will be
considered.

PROCEEDINGS:

The proceedings of this workshop will be published together with the
proceedings of other IPDPS '03 workshops by the IEEE Computer Society
Press.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS:

We are planning a purely electronic submission and review process.
Authors are requested to submit papers (in PDF format) not exceeding
10 single-spaced pages, including abstract, five key words, contact
address, figures, and references.  E-mail your manuscripts to:
cac@cis.ohio-state.edu.

Note: the PDF file must be viewable using the ``acroread'' tool.  It
is also important, when creating your PDF file, to use a page size of
8.5x11 inches (LETTER sized output not A4), since an A4 sized page may
be truncated on a LETTER sized printer.

SCHEDULE:

Paper submission:             November 4, 2002
Notification of acceptance:   December 16, 2002
Camera-ready due:             January 24, 2003

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS:

Dhabaleswar K. Panda (Ohio State),
Jose Duato (Univ. of Valencia, Spain), and
Craig Stunkel (IBM TJ Watson Research Center)

PUBLICITY COORDINATORS:

Darius Buntinas        (Ohio State University)
Nectarios G. Koziris   (National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

On the World Wide Web, see http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~cac for the
latest information about this workshop.  Alternatively, you can send
e-mail to cac@cis.ohio-state.edu.