Call for Papers
Middleware is often constructed from components and interconnects spanning a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, executing in environments with unpredictable latencies, unknown availability, and concurrent demand for resources. Designing, deploying, and reasoning about consistency models (e.g., serializability, snapshot isolation, eventual consistency, etc.) and invariants (e.g., partial order, equivalence, or generic guarantees, etc.) involves subtle tradeoffs in terms of fault tolerance, performance, scalability and programmability.
This topic area will bring together researchers and practitioners facing these tradeoffs in the context of modern middleware, which must allow for fluid placement of computation and data between everything from sensors to multi-domain clouds. In such environments, the problem of maintaining consistency is exacerbated by widespread replication — including client-managed data. We envision participants interested in a range of questions in programmability and consistency, including:
- What are suitable future programming models for consistency in middleware? What logical abstractions for consistency are useful and tolerable?
- Which low-level information (e.g., bandwidth, latency or location) should show through to the programmer, to allow the middleware to adapt its consistency strategy effectively?
- What consistency models are used/effective in current middleware and why?
- What are suitable future programming models for consistency in middleware?
- What logical abstrations for consistency are useful and tolerable?
- Which distributed consensus protocols (e.g., RAFT, Paxos, and ZooKeeper) are practical in middleware, when and why?
- Can design patterns help comprehensibility of consistency models?
- What are the most effective/promising deployment techniques for weak consistency, strong consistency, and strategies that fall somewhere in between?
- What are the most critical factors for middleware developers to consider when selecting between competing consistency models?
- How can middleware extend consistency ”to the edge”?
Tentative workshop paper submission and notification deadlines:
- August 20, 2015 – Paper Submissions Deadline
- September 20, 2015 – Notifications
- October 3, 2015 – Camera Ready Papers
All papers must be written in English and formatted according to the ACM proceedings format. Submissions must not be more than six (6) pages, and shorter papers are also encouraged. Papers must be submitted in PDF format via the workshop Web site and will be accepted based on relevance to the topics of the workshop, technical contribution, and potential for an interesting discussion. Authors of accepted papers will have the option to publish electronically in the ACM Digital Library.
AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)