Scope

In the last years it is manifest that the world of high-end parallel servers and distributed computing systems/applications (in their continuous evolving declinations of high-performance computing, grid computing, and cloud computing, and supports to mobile cloud computing) is paying increasing attention to the technical challenges related to quality of service, determination of temporal behavior and response of software platforms, interactivity, and performance of communication mechanisms and tools. In modern computation centers, traditional distributed applications may coexist with other supports and services that become more and more time-sensitive (cross-border surveillance and object tracking, big data analysis, smart city application supports, net gaming, adaptive video streaming, etc.), and this tends to happen more and more frequently on virtual resources hosted by a virtualized infrastructure.

Therefore, the design, implementation, and deployment of distributed reliable systems must take into careful account the critical and still open technical challenges about the dynamic selection and runtime evaluation of interaction models and software technologies/, as well as their temporal behavior, resource efficiency, performance, scalability, and coordination overhead vs. flexibility. In addition, this track calls for novel contributions about dynamic middleware solutions capable of taking context-aware resource management decisions to enforce the most appropriate quality levels depending on application SLAs and overall (possibly clustered) visibility of resource status. These solutions are particularly challenging when dealing with large-scale open deployment environments and their associated scalability issues.

Novel and relevant application domains push for evolution and disruptive research in this field; only to mention a few, middleware solutions for datacenter resource management optimization for quality-aware online stream processing of big data flows, energy-aware middleware for resource management in smart city/smart grid deployment environments, middleware for cloud-hosted cyber-physical systems with strict requirements on latency and reliability.

Given the above motivations, track topics include (but are not limited to) the challenging issues in the design of reliable and resource-efficient middleware solutions:

• Cloud computing advances for cyber-physical systems and mobile cloud computing
• Communication middleware for efficient reliability in wide-scale environments
• Efficient and context-aware management of big data flows (e.g., to support smart city apps)
• Efficient integration with run-time supports: operating systems and virtualization technologies
• Middleware for the efficient integration of cyber-physical systems and the cloud
• Programming models and languages for reliable high-end distributed systems
• Quality-aware middleware for datacenter resource management
• Reactive stream processing and on line processing of big data flows
• Reliable and time-sensitive distribution models
• Resource-efficient and time-constrained interaction models
• Scalability solutions and evaluation of reliable communications and distributed systems in wide deployment scenarios
• Simulation/emulation-based and on-the-field performance evaluation of distributed applications