[erlang-questions] [ANN] PMLDC 2016, Call for Papers

[Christopher Meiklejohn]

First Workshop on Programming Models and Languages for Distributed
Computing (PMLDC 2016)

Co-located with ECOOP 2016, Rome, Italy

Date: July 17th, 2016

Whether you are programming a rich web application in JavaScript that
mutates state in the client’s browser, or you are building a massively
deployed mobile application that will operate with client state at the
device, it’s undeniable that you are building a distributed system!

Two major challenges of programming distributed systems are
concurrency and partial failure. Concurrency of operations can
introduce accidental nondeterminism: computations may result in
different outcomes with the same inputs given scheduling differences
in the underlying system unless a synchronization mechanism is used to
enforce some order. Synchronization is typically expensive, and
reduces the efficiency of user applications. Partial failure, or the
failure of one or more components in a distributed system at one time,
introduces the challenge of knowing, when an operation fails, which
components of the operation completed successfully. To solve these
problems in practice on an unreliable, asynchronous network, atomic
commit protocols and timeouts as failure detection are typically used.

Because of these challenges, early approaches to providing programming
abstractions for distributed computing that ignored them were
inherently misguided: the canonical example being the Remote Procedure
Call, still widely deployed in industry.

The goal of this workshop is to discuss new approaches to distributed
programming that provide efficient execution and the elimination of
accidental nondeterminism resulting from concurrency and partial
failure. It will bring together both practitioners and theoreticians
from many disciplines: database theory, distributed systems, systems
programming, programming languages, data-centric programming, web
application development, and verification, to discuss the
state-of-the-art of distributed programming, advancement of the
state-of-the-art and paths forward to better application of theory in
practice.

The main objectives of this workshop are the following:

To review the state-of-the-art research in languages, models, and
systems for distributed programming;
To identify areas of critical need where research can advance the
state of the art;
To create a forum for discussion;
To present open problems from practitioners with an aim towards
motivating academic research on relevant problems faced by industry.

In the spirit of both ECOOP and Curry On, this workshop aims at
favoring a multidisciplinary perspective by bringing together
researchers, developers, and practitioners from both academia and
industry.

Submission Guidelines

We solicit proposals for contributed talks. We recommend preparing
proposals of 2 pages, in ACM 2 column SIGPLAN style, written in
English and in PDF format. However, we will accept longer proposals or
submissions to other conferences, under the understanding that PC
members are only expected to read the first two pages of such longer
submissions. Authors with accepted papers will have the opportunity to
have their submission published on the ACM Digital Library.

Important Dates

Paper submission: May 6, 2016 (any place on Earth)
Authors notification: June 10, 2016
Final version: June 17, 2016