HPDC ´12 : proceedings of the 21st ACM symposium on high-performance parallel and distributed computing, June 18-22, 2012, Delft, The Netherlands

Welcome to ACM HPDC 2012! This is the twenty-first year of HPDC and we are pleased to report that our community continues to grow in size, quality and reputation. The program consists of three days packed with presentations on the latest developments in high-performance parallel and distributed computing. Featured events include the ceremony to present the "Achievement Award" to Prof. Ian Foster followed by his keynote address reflecting on 20 years of Grid computing, as well as keynote talks by Dr. Mihai Budiu on "big-data" analytics, Prof. Ricardo Bianchini on leveraging renewable energy in data centers. Technical paper sessions focus on virtualization, high-performance storage, massively parallel processors, resource management, energy, data analytics, and networked systems. Awards for best paper, best talk, and best poster will be given in the concluding session on Friday. This year we have introduced two major changes in the reviewing process: author rebuttals and a two phase review process. Our goals were twofold: first to give authors the chance to respond to reviewer's comments to help identify the strongest submissions by a rigorous and balanced reviewing process focusing on quality as the most important criterion. A second, to provide additional feedback to the authors of the most promising submissions, to continue to raise the quality of the technical program and continue to make HPDC an attractive venue that will attract top quality submissions. 143 full papers were submitted for review this year. A program committee of 45 experts, assisted by 15 external reviewers considered the submissions and wrote a total of 623 reviews. All papers received at least three reviews, and most papers that have reached the second stage of the review process received six reviews. The program committee met in March at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to select the program, and chose 23 full papers for presentation, yielding an acceptance rate of 16.1 percent. In addition, seven papers were selected for poster presentation, and are accompanied by a two-page abstract in the proceedings. This was a large number of submissions; many truly good papers were declined. On the positive side, we are convinced you will enjoy a high-quality program! On the two days preceding the main conference, six affiliated workshops will take place. Each of these workshops is a small conference by itself, and provides a venue for presenting work on focused and emerging topics. The workshops are: •ECMLS: The Third International Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences Workshop •MapReduce: The Third International Workshop on MapReduce and its Applications •ScienceCloud: The Third Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing •VTDC: The Sixth International Workshop on Virtual Technologies in Distributed Computing •DIDC: Fifth International Workshop on Data-Intensive Distributed Computing •Astro-HPC: The First Workshop on High-Performance Computing for Astronomy The proceedings available at the conference contain 23 full papers and 7 poster abstracts from the main conference. These, along with papers from the affiliated workshops, will be incorporated into the ACM Digital Library