Special Issue: Euro‐Par 2011

Abstract

This special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience contains revised and extended versions of selected papers presented at the conference Euro-Par 2011.Euro-Par-the European Conference on Parallel Computing-is an annual series of international conferences dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects of parallel and distributed computing. Euro-Par covers a wide spectrum of topics from algorithms and theory to software technology and hardware-related issues, with application areas ranging from scientific to mobile and cloud computing. The major part of the Euro-Par audience consists of researchers in academic institutions, government laboratories and industrial organizations.Euro-Par 2011, the 17th conference in the Euro-Par series, was organized by the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) and the University of Bordeaux, and held at the University of Bordeaux in the center of Bordeaux, France.Sixteen broad topics were defined and advertised, covering a large variety of aspects of parallel and distributed computing. The call for papers attracted a total of 271 submissions. The submitted papers were reviewed at least three and, in many cases, four times (3.58 on average). A total of 81 papers were finally accepted for publication. This makes a global acceptance rate of 29.9%. The authors of accepted papers come from 26 countries, with the four main contributing countries-the USA, France, Spain and Germany-accounting for about 64% of them. The distribution of papers follows the pattern typical for a Euro-Par conference: 58% are authored by academic researchers, 26% by students, and 12% by other authors (industry, non-governmental organizations, and government).With the results of the reviews and a majority opinion of the respective topic program committees, several papers were recommended for a special journal issue. The authors were contacted at the conference and invited to submit revised and extended versions of their papers. These new versions were reviewed independently by three reviewers; two had also reviewed the conference version, the third had not. Eventually, six papers were accepted for publication.Topic 2 on Performance Prediction and Evaluation is represented by the paper Backfilling with guarantees made as jobs arrive, authored by Alexander Lindsay, Maxwell Galloway-Carson, Christopher Johnson, David Bunde, and Vitus Leung [1]. In job scheduling, the term backfilling refers to the approach of assigning a job an earlier time than the predicted starting time if holes appear in the scheduling plan. Their new contribution is to give preference to jobs with higher priority, as defined by a job selection function. They explore two different such functions and validate their benefits with simulation experiments.Topic 5 on Parallel and Distributed Data Management is represented by the paper ISABELA for effective in situ compression of scientific data, authored by Sriram Lakshminarasimhan, Neil Shah, Stephane Ethier, Seung-Hoe Ku, C. S. Chan...