Subject: Re: Request to review a paper
Resent-Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 15:48:33 -0400
Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox <gcf@mailer.csit.fsu.edu>
Resent-To: Geoffrey Fox <gcfpc@csit.fsu.edu>
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 17:01:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Vaidy Sunderam <vss@mathcs.emory.edu>
To: fox@csit.fsu.edu
Geoffrey,
Below, please find my review of the paper you sent
me recently for refereeing. I hope my comments are
helpful. Please let me know if I can be of any
further assistance.
Regards
Vaidy Sunderam
REFEREE'S REPORT
Concurrency and Computation:Practice and Experience
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A: General Information
Please return to:
Geoffrey C. Fox
Electronically Preferred fox@csit.fsu.edu
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
Computational Science and Information Technology
Florida State University
400 Dirac Science Library
Tallahassee Florida 32306-4130
Office FAX 850-644-0098
Office Phone 850-644-4587 but best is cell phone 3152546387
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: C467
* Date: 8/3/00
* Paper Title: VGDS: A Distributed Data Structure Framework for
Scientific Computation
* Author(s): Lu and Wu
* Referee: Vaidy Sunderam
* Address: Dept. of Math & CS, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322
Referee Recommendations. Please indicate overall recommendations here, and
details in following sections.
1. publish as is (very minor suggestions/edits)
D: Referee Comments (For Editor Only)
E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor)
This is an interesting paper that is well-suited for
publication in CP & E. The authors present some good
background information and motivation for the VGDS
framework, and make a strong case fpr libraries of
data structures architecturally layered via the
VGDS abstraction - in such a way that the modeling
is conceptually clear, while making implementations
practicable. The description of the framework itself
is comprehensive enough to understand the architecture
well. Similarly, the critical issues in implementation
are identified in Section 3, followed by a concise
description of their practical implementation. I would
suggest a slightly more detailed discussion of the
coherence issues on page 7. The case study in the
following section helps to consolidate the framework;
I would like to see discussions of other data structures
if possible. The most attractive aspect of the project and
the paper is that it includes results for several
applications and interestingly, the results indicate
a very high level of efficiency (90%). One question
I had concerns scalability -- this issue should at
least be discussed further or preferably, empirical
results on scaling should be provided. Finally,
the authors should indicate or comment on the availability
of the software, since as a "practice and experience"
work, it is very likely to be of interest and
value to practitioners. If these minor suggestions
are incorporated, the paper will become worthy of
publication and I thus recommend acceptance.
F: Presentation Changes