Birds of a Feather (BoF) Sessions at DSN 2008:

BoF #1
Key Dependability Issues and Future Directions for Research in the Area of Computing with Cell Phones

Shivakant Mishra, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado

There are 1.5 billion cell phones in the world today, more than three times the number of PCs. Already, these cell phones can be used to browse the web, take pictures, send emails and play games. Indeed, with our cell phones getting smarter and faster and with the development of mobile operating systems like Android, cell phones are turning into the next computer. The field of computing with cell phones is at its infancy at the moment. Accordingly, the research challenges in building interesting applications using cell phones are fresh and in many cases still unknown. The goal of this BOF session is to identify key dependability issues and future directions for research in the area of computing with cell phones. In particular, questions such as "What are the key research challenges in distributed computing using cell phones?"; "Are there any fundamentally new dependability challenges in computing with cell phones?"; and "How is distributed computing with cell phones different from other forms of distributed computing?" will be discussed.

Bof #2
Reliability Issues and Opportunities for Multicore, Multithreaded Microprocessors

Alan Wood and Ishwar Parulkar, Sun Microsystems, USA

In the industry's never-ending quest to maximize computer system performance, two complementary trends have recently emerged: multicore and multithreaded microprocessors. Multicore microprocessors use the increasing number of transistors more efficiently, both for higher performance and for lower power consumption. Multithreaded microprocessors take advantage of thread level parallelism to keep the multiple cores highly utilized. In this BOF session, the participants will discuss (1) potential reliability issues with multicore, multithreaded microprocessors, (2) inherent reliability improvements due to multicore, multithreaded microprocessors, and (3) opportunities to use multicore, multithreaded microprocessors to improve reliability.

Bof #3
Education in Resilient Computing Systems: why and how?

Jean-Claude Laprie (LAAS-CNRS, France) and Luca Simoncini (University of Pisa, Italy)

The European Network of Excellence ReSIST (Resilience for Survivability in Information Society Technologies) gathers more than 180 researchers and doctorate students, from 14 academic institutions and 4 industrial companies, from 8 countries. The ReSIST rationale addresses the gap in dependability and security between dedicated, fault-tolerant systems, and commodity-oriented systems (such as the Web). During its first two years of existence, ReSIST has produced, among many outputs, a state of knowledge in resilience-building technologies, a research agenda in resilience-scaling technologies, a knowledge base in resilient computing, and a curriculum in resilient computing. A courseware is currently being built.

After a brief overview of the ReSIST activities, the birds of a feather session will focus on the curriculum and courseware issues: why proposing and promoting such a curriculum? How to organize it, and which courseware should be attached to it? How and at which level to deliver the corresponding education? The resilience knowledge base, which plays a prominent role in information gathering and dissemination (including for education) will also be demonstrated.

Call for Proposals Birds of a Feather (BoF) Sessions at DSN 2008:

We are pleased to announce that the 2008 Dependable Systems and Networks Symposium (DSN 2008) will, for the first time, feature "Birds of a Feather" sessions, to be held on Wednesday evening, June 25, 2008.

A Birds of a Feather (BoF) session provides a gathering place and discussion forum for those interested in the same issues and concepts. BoFs can be organized for sharing ideas on the specific topics, narrow or broad.

These are not workshops or sessions where people present papers, but open, "brainstorming" forums for attendees who want to get together with others to share their current interests, goals, technology, environment, or backgrounds.

BoFs are popular because of their interactive and flexible format and the fact that they offer attendees and technology experts an opportunity to interact at a peer level.

If you want to organize and run a Birds of a Feather session, please send me a descriptive proposal by 7 April 2008.

Topics will be evaluated on the basis of their promise to engage a significant number of the conferences participants in a fruitful discussion. Possible examples include:

1. Reliability and security of critical infrastructures, e.g., power grid
2. Multi-core processor architectures: opportunities and challenges from the reliability and security perspective
3. Virtual machines: reliability and performance tradeoffs or how to avoid virtual machines to become a single point of failure?
4. Fault-tolerance challenges in large server clusters
5. Adaptation and self-organization in ubiquitous computing

While we would welcome BOF organizers for the above topics, the purpose of this CFP is to ask *you* to propose topics around which a community of interested researchers would coalesce at DSN. We are explicitly not looking for marketing or recruiting sessions; however, commercial entities are encouraged to propose sessions on current technical issues.

Bob Swarz:
Email: rswarz@mitre.org
Telephone: +1 781-271-2847
Fax: +1 508-258-1124