Subject: Paper review ( C523 ) From: Matt Welsh Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 23:16:56 -0700 To: gcf@indiana.edu X-UIDL: 7f19eb06bb1c0000 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Received: by mailer.csit.fsu.edu (mbox gcfpc) (with Cubic Circle's cucipop (v1.31 1998/05/13) Wed Aug 29 07:40:17 2001) X-From_: fox@mailer.csit.fsu.edu Wed Aug 29 07:39:03 2001 Return-Path: Delivered-To: gcfpc@csit.fsu.edu Received: from dirac.csit.fsu.edu (dirac.csit.fsu.edu [144.174.128.44]) by mailer.csit.fsu.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A3E323A0E for ; Wed, 29 Aug 2001 07:39:03 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost by dirac.csit.fsu.edu (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7) id HAA42198; Wed, 29 Aug 2001 07:39:03 -0400 (EDT) Resent-Message-Id: <200108291139.HAA42198@dirac.csit.fsu.edu> Delivered-To: fox@csit.fsu.edu Received: from mask.uits.indiana.edu (mask.uits.indiana.edu [129.79.6.184]) by mailer.csit.fsu.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 42C9423A07 for ; Wed, 29 Aug 2001 02:16:58 -0400 (EDT) Received: from bhikku.cs.berkeley.edu (bhikku.CS.Berkeley.EDU [128.32.131.202]) by mask.uits.indiana.edu (8.10.1/8.10.1/IUPO) with ESMTP id f7T6FL722946 for ; Wed, 29 Aug 2001 01:15:21 -0500 (EST) Received: from bhikku.cs.berkeley.edu (mdw@localhost) by bhikku.cs.berkeley.edu (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id f7T6GuC22470 for ; Tue, 28 Aug 2001 23:16:57 -0700 Message-Id: <200108290616.f7T6GuC22470@bhikku.cs.berkeley.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: bhikku.cs.berkeley.edu: mdw owned process doing -bs Reply-To: Matt Welsh Resent-To: Geoffrey Fox Resent-Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 07:39:02 -0400 Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox Geoffrey, Here are my comments. I am not sure the right way to approach this paper. It is rather odd and the scope is quite broad -- let me know if you would like any more comments. Matt -- REFEREE'S REPORT Concurrency and Computation:Practice and Experience ********** A: General Information Please return to: Geoffrey C. Fox Electronically Preferred gcf@indiana.edu Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Computer Science Department 228 Lindley Hall Bloomington Indiana 47405 Office Phone 8128567977(Lab), 8128553788(CS) but best is cell phone 3152546387 FAX 8128567972 Please fill in Summary Conclusions (Sec. C) and details as appropriate in Secs. D, E and F. B: Refereeing Philosophy We encourage a broad range of readers and contributors. Please judge papers on their technical merit and separate comments on this from those on style and approach. Keep in mind the strong practical orientation that we are trying to give the journal. Note that the forms attached provide separate paper for comments that you wish only the editor to see and those that both the editor and author receive. Your identity will of course not be revealed to the author. C: Paper and Referee Metadata Paper Number Cnnn: C523 Date: 28 Aug 2001 Paper Title: Towards a Common Development Framework for Distributed Applications Author(s): F. A. Rabhi Referee: M. Welsh Address: UC Berkeley CS Division, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1776 USA mdw@cs.berkeley.edu Referee Recommendations. Please indicate overall recommendations here, and details in following sections. Overall recommendation: reject D: Referee Comments (For Editor Only) See below. E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor) This is a curious paper. While it is clear that the author intended this as a broad survey, after a careful reading I am not sure that this is the kind of submission that CCPE is looking for. My main concern about the paper is that it does not provide adequate detail about the systems and techniques described to be of real value as a survey, nor does it present any significant new direction or synthesis of ideas to be compelling. The title is somewhat misleading in this regard as well. On the other hand, the paper does cover a very broad scope of topics and could be potentially useful -- if focused towards a particular audience and with a particular theme. As it stands this paper reads as the draft of an intro textbook chapter on distributed computing; I would hope that the audience for CCPE would be well-versed in most of these areas already. However, I believe this paper could be retasked to focus on the cross-fertilization of distributed systems techniques with parallel computing (or vice versa). This would yield an altogether different paper, which is why I am recommending rejection for this paper as it stands. The real value here would be in introducing techniques from distributed computing fields and making specific recommendations for their application to parallel computing. (The discussion could go in both directions, but I would advocate a more focused approach rather than attempting to bite off too much.) In particular I recommend a tutorial on applying techniques from one area (distributed systems, say) to a problem or set of problems in parallel computing. This would still essentially be a survey although more directed at particular problems and at gaining a better understanding of both approaches. Some specific recommendations on the text follow. Section 2 is very high-level and apart from establishing some basic terminology simply reiterates well-known concepts. I would suggest trimming this section down considerably and extracting the basic definitions as required for other sections of the paper. There seems to be some missing text in the last paragraph on page 5, starting with "development cycleomising [sic] development ..." The paper uses too many forward references to technologies which are described in later portions of the text. Examples include "See Section 4.3" in section 3.2, "to be described later" in Section 4.2, and the use of the term "configuration language" before its definition in Section 5.4. Some reorganization of the presentation would be extremely helpful for clarity. In addition there are many unexpanded acronyms in the text (JSD, CODARTS, UML, etc.) that are not in common usage (at least within the parallel computing community). Section 4.2 does not seem to be closely related to real-time systems; many of these techniques are applied to concurrent systems in general. If there are specific ways in which these techniques are used in real-time systems that are useful, it would be good to point them out. POSIX is not only a standard for thread-based systems; you should reference POSIX 1003.1c (1995) instead. You should cite the standard. The appendix seems somewhat contrived and does not illustrate the mechanisms very well. Showing a set of UML diagrams is not particularly useful if the reader is not familiar with UML or the meaning of the diagram symbols. Also, it would have been very useful to include concrete examples (such as the one presented in this appendix) during the discussion throughout the paper; this would have helped to make the description of the various concepts more concrete. Leaving this material as an appendix does not really do it justice. F: Presentation Changes .