Call For Papers

A special issue of Concurrency: Practice and Experience (CPE) is being planned for Fall of 1998. Papers submitted and accepted for this
issue will be published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. in the CPE Journal and in addition will be made available electronically via the WWW.

Background

One of the key problems in taking advantage of the potential of High Performance Computing is that access to computational and information
resources has traditionally been complicated, as well as heavily dependent on computer architectures, systems, and administrative
mechanisms. Although recent advances in network bandwidth - together with revolutionary access mechanisms such as the World Wide
Web - now promise to enable the practical access to remote resources, many challenges remain. Network security is not yet adequate for
the general access to valuable resources over a WAN. The interface to HPC engines and information repositories tends to be difficult and
architecture-specific. The administration of users, jobs, and resources is complicated by non-uniform mechanisms at autonomous sites.

A recent workshop on Seamless Computing was held at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF). Further information about the Seamless Computing initiative, a European project called UNICORE and a SC'97 BOF can be found there. 

Call For Papers

This is a call for papers about the use and exploitation of distributed computing environments in a seamless manner, the following areas are of particular interest:

• Security requirements and mechanisms:

• Requirements for protecting the integrity of both client and server resources.
• The authentication of remote users requesting access to "your" local resources
• How to achieve network integrity within a WAN (possibly within the Web).
• How to interoperate across firewalls.

• Interfaces and mechanisms for uniform job submission, data access, and resource visibility at distributed and heterogeneous sites:

• Using the mechanisms of the Web to make HPC and data resources available as a commodity over the  internet.
• Mapping the access mechanisms of specific architectures to a more uniform interface.
• Accessing data from remote file systems and archives, including the challenge of disjoint name spaces.
• Comparing the challenges of batch and interactive access modes.
• Evaluating existing network tools for job submission, information access, job visibility, etc.

• More uniform mechanisms for the administration and management of users, jobs, and resources at autonomous sites:

• How to control resource access in a global environment consisting of fragmented name spaces for users, files, and other resources.
• Possibilities for more uniform specification and enforcement of resource usage limits.
• Possibilities for more uniform accounting, uniform resource currency, etc.

• The role of vendors:

• How can vendors best contribute to the development of seamless interfaces?
• Can we develop a set of recommendations or requirements?

• Timescales for Paper Submission
• Details about Paper Submissions

Last updated by Mark Baker on 31st October 1998