Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Vision

Computing and Communication technology is changing business, academia and
society. Research advances are increasingly driven by the practice and
experience from using large-scale distributed and parallel systems.
Concurrency is central to enabling the new computational systems. We have
tens of millions of concurrent clients on the World Wide Web and many
thousands of powerful nodes in high-end massively parallel machines (MPP)
or commodity clusters.The world wide deployment of intelligent
cellular phones and other palm-sized devices with wireless connections
will lead to even greater power and much higher degrees of concurrency.
Equally complex issues come from the networks of intelligent devices in
vehicles and homes. Moore's Law will continue to drive the silicon
industry for some years yet, although there may be some slowing down in
the next decade. One can reliably project continued rapid progress
within ten years, Exaop performance from the Web and Petaflop capabilities
in closely coupled parallel machines. This leads to a confusing rich
choice of architectures with distributed memory PC clusters or Web-based
computers and shared memory MPPs. These are enabled and coupled with
corresponding boosts in wide-area network performance and deployment with
a blurring and convergence of computing and communication. Optical and
wireless technologies will enable even more powerful systems. This
hardware juggernaut is coupled to new languages and programming paradigms,
such as Java and XML for the Web and multithreading, HPF and MPI for
parallel systems. The combination of concurrent digital and optical
technology is expected to create a new Global Information Infrastructure
(GII) or Grid that will enable new applications, and open up a new set
of communication and computer software and architecture challenges. Each
application areas will spawn computation, information and knowledge
grids with portals as the integrated user interface. We need portabe,
scalable, dependable and secure solutions. These technology developments
will be driven by this global 'e-science agenda and deployed in a wide
range of academic, research, and commercial application areas. Users are
already gaining a substantial amount of practical experience in the type
of problems that are enabled or enhanced by this amazing infrastructure.
New computational methods, such as mobile agents, cellular automata and
massively parallel neural networks are particularly suited to concurrent
execution. There is a rapid growth in both scientific (grand challenges)
and information (national challenge) applications that drive both the
functionality and high performance of the base technologies. These
challenges will increasingly be global in nature and will impact
academia, business, the homes and education. Advances in human-computer
interfaces are also opening up new applications with full immersive
environments becoming available, and tools to support those with
disabilities broadening the reach of the computer and communication
revolution.



This journal will focus on practical experience, and will
cover the application of these converging trends to solve real problems.
In particular, themes for our papers could include:

 * The computer science or application aspects of using modern
   computing, communication and information technology to solve specific
   problems in academia, industry and society. Increasingly these will
   be global e-science problems using some form of grid infrastructure.
 * Concurrent algorithms and computational methods
 * Applications and Technologies for petaflop parallel computing; novel
   ideas for high performance systems
 * Computational Grids, Metacomputing, Problem Solving Environments and
   Portals
 * Information and Knowledge Grids, Data-mining, Knowledge Discovery
 * Dependability and security issues, adaptable and mobile grids
 * Programming environments, operating systems, tools, concurrent
   languages, compilers, interpreters
 * Relevance of new languages such as Java for large-scale systems
 * Relevance of distributed objects and their integration into large
   scale systems
 * Implications of the growing power and use of wireless enabled
   palm-sized devices
 * Performance prediction, analysis, models and results
 * Applications, and algorithm and software technologies arising from
   the World Wide Web including novel areas, such as education
 * Unification of computing and communication; unification of parallel
   and distributed computing