Subject: Re: Request to review a paper C523: From: Sergei Gorlatch Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 13:12:14 +0200 (MEST) To: Geoffrey Fox X-UIDL: 0bbd87086d140000 X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Received: by mailer.csit.fsu.edu (mbox gcfpc) (with Cubic Circle's cucipop (v1.31 1998/05/13) Wed Oct 17 08:50:26 2001) X-From_: fox@mailer.csit.fsu.edu Wed Oct 17 08:49:59 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 26BD623A2A for ; Wed, 17 Oct 2001 08:49:59 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost by dirac.csit.fsu.edu (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7) id IAA25092; Wed, 17 Oct 2001 08:49:58 -0400 (EDT) Resent-Message-Id: <200110171249.IAA25092@dirac.csit.fsu.edu> Replied: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 08:49:51 -0400 Replied: Sergei Gorlatch Delivered-To: fox@csit.fsu.edu Received: from mail.cs.tu-berlin.de (mail.cs.tu-berlin.de [130.149.17.13]) by mailer.csit.fsu.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8F27F23A12 for ; Tue, 16 Oct 2001 08:57:45 -0400 (EDT) Received: from presto.cs.tu-berlin.de (root@presto.cs.tu-berlin.de [130.149.17.51]) by mail.cs.tu-berlin.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA04975 for ; Tue, 16 Oct 2001 14:29:29 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from gorlatch@localhost) by presto.cs.tu-berlin.de (8.10.2+Sun/8.9.3) id f9GBCFI16956; Tue, 16 Oct 2001 13:12:15 +0200 (MEST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <200108201743.NAA127296@dirac.csit.fsu.edu> References: <15232.45168.738282.174263@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <200108201743.NAA127296@dirac.csit.fsu.edu> X-Mailer: VM 6.43 under 20.4 "Emerald" XEmacs Lucid Message-ID: <15308.5493.682495.821663@presto> Resent-To: Geoffrey Fox Resent-Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 08:49:58 -0400 Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox Dear Geoffrey, please find enclosed my review for paper C523. I recommend a major revision and re-submission. Best wishes, Sergei -- Prof. Sergei Gorlatch | Tel.: +49 (0)30 31473258 Technical University of Berlin | Tel.: +49 (0)30 31473230 (secretary) Sekr. FR 5-6 | Fax.: +49 (0)30 31473291 Franklinstr. 28/29 | Email: gorlatch@cs.tu-berlin.de D-10587 Berlin, Germany | http://pvp.cs.tu-berlin.de/gorlatch/ ****************************** The paper's motivation is pretty interesting and challenging -- to try and analyze commonalities of development techniques coming from historically different fields of concurrent, distributed, real-time, and parallel computing. So the contribution as expected consists of two parts: a) an overview of existing approaches; b) an analysis of the relations, overlappings, cross-fertilization etc. While part a) is covered by the author quite well, the most interesting part, b), is still too weak and should be improved. Without this part the paper just provides a commonly available information which one can find in textbooks. Therefore, the paper in the current version does not fully deliver on its promise. There is just too little of a really new insight which one would expect from a journal paper. I am strongly in favor of this paper's objective and would encourage the author to revise her/his paper along the lines stated here and to re-submit. The plus of the paper is a very good overview of current work on distributed applications with many useful references. Also the case study in the appendix is interesting, but again, every single diagram and solution presented is well known from textbooks on the subject. Unfortunately, the example does not clarify the point how methods from different areas of parallel and distributed computing can be used together or interchangeably. Some additional comments: 1. In section 2.1 you write that distributed applications mostly differ in non-functional requirements. Do you mean they differ in that respect from sequential applications or do you mean the difference among various distributed applications? If the former, then I don't agree: performance is also very important in sequential programming and cache optmizations are similar to optimizations in distributed programming. If you mean the latter then please explain in detail. 2. Sometimes it is not clear where particular concepts are placed in the developement cycle Example: In section 6.4 you write that skeletons are very similar to patterns. In figure 4 you classify design patterns as design phase and skeletons as implementation phase. Probably skeletons should be made a member of the design phase as well? 3. You distinguish between formal(3.1) and semi-formal models(4.2) and mention statecharts in section 4.2. Shouldn't state charts rather belong to the formal stuff? 4. In section 6.2, when mentioning BSP, you probably should also mention LogP and its extensions for heterogeneous, i.e. distributed case. ******************************** .