Subject: Re: Request to review a paper Resent-Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 15:48:33 -0400 Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox Resent-To: Geoffrey Fox Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 17:01:06 -0400 (EDT) From: Vaidy Sunderam 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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