[hpc-announce] [PaPoC21] The 8th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data

[Roberto Palmieri]

Call for Papers: The 8th Workshop on Principles and Practice of
Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC 2021)

Website: https://papoc-workshop.github.io/2021

Workshop date: Monday, April 26th, 2021 (co-located with the EuroSys
2021 conference) - Virtual Conference.

Submission deadline: February 5, 2021
Notification date: February 26, 2021
Camera-Ready: March 19, 2021

Consistency is one of the fundamental issues of distributed computing.
Beyond the well-known tension between Consistency, Availability, and
Partition-tolerance, as captured by the CAP theorem, many nuanced
consistency models and algorithms have been developed for different
purposes. These consistency models have subtly different behaviour in
practice, which translates to difficult choices between fault
tolerance, performance, and programmability. The issues and trade-offs
are particularly vexing at scale, with a large number of processes or
large shared databases, and in the presence of high latency and
failure-prone networks, such as edge computing and peer-to-peer
networks.
Since its inception in 2014, the PaPoC workshop series has brought
together researchers and practitioners who seek to develop better
techniques and a better understanding of consistency in distributed
systems. We welcome contributions from a wide range of backgrounds:
system development, distributed algorithms, concurrency, fault
tolerance, databases, programming languages, blockchain, and
verification. While there is no one universally best solution, we
believe that by bringing together these perspectives, we can develop
techniques that provide useful guarantees to applications, that are
usable by application developers, and that satisfy real-world
scalability, performance, and reliability requirements.

The workshop is looking for contributions on the following, and
associated, topics:

- Design principles, correctness conditions, and programming patterns
for scalable distributed data management systems.
- Techniques for relaxed consistency models: session guarantees,
causal consistency, operational transformation, conflict-free
replicated data types (CRDTs), monotonic programming, state merging,
operation commutativity, etc.
- Data consistency in geo-replicated, peer-to-peer, and edge networks.
- Techniques for scaling and improving the performance of strongly
consistent systems (e.g., Paxos-based, state machine replication,
shared-log consensus, blockchains).
- How to expose consistency vs. performance and scalability trade-offs
in the programming model, and how to help developers choose.
- How to support composed operations spanning multiple objects
(transactions, sagas, workflows).
- Reasoning, analysis and verification of application programs using
storage systems with weak consistency models.
- Formal methods for verifying safety and progress of distributed
applications and systems
- Strengthening the guarantees beyond consistency: fault tolerance,
security, ensuring invariants are preserved, bounding metadata size,
and controlling divergence.

The PaPoC workshop invites short papers up to 6 pages (including
references) discussing original contributions, experience reports, or
work in progress reports (supported by initial validations). We also
accept longer proposals, under the understanding that PC members are
only expected to read the first six pages. Submissions do not need to
be anonymised.

Authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to choose whether
they want their papers published in ACM Digital Library (along with
papers from other EuroSys workshops). In any case, accepted papers
will be made available to participants of the workshop. At least one
author of each accepted submission is expected to present their work
at the workshop, and to be available for discussions.

Further details and instructions for submissions can be found on the
workshop web page:
https://papoc-workshop.github.io/2021

Program Chairs

- Roberto Palmieri (Lehigh University, USA)
- Heidi Howard (University of Cambridge, UK)

List of PC members:
* Masoud Saeida Ardekani, Google, USA
* Alysson Bessani, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
* Jim Dowling, Logical Clocks, Sweden
* Vincent Gramoli, University of Sydney, Australia
* Rachid Guerraoui, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
* Sandeep Hans, IBM, India
* Christopher Meiklejohn, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Sebastiano Peluso, Facebook, USA
* Henry Robinson, Slack, USA
* Paolo Romano, INESC, Portugal
* Marco Serafini, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
* Ali Shoker, VORTEX Colab, Portugal
* KC Sivaramakrishnan, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
* Pierre Sutra, Télécom SudParis, France
* Adriana Szekeres, VMware, USA
* Lewis Tseng, Boston College, USA
* Peter van Hardenberg, Ink & Switch, San Francisco, USA

Steering Committee:
* Peter Bailis (Stanford University, USA)
* Carlos Baquero (HASLab, INESC TEC & University of Minho, Portugal)
* Annette Bieniusa (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany)
* Carla Ferreira (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal)
* Alexey Gotsman (IMDEA Software Institute, Spain)
* Martin Kleppmann (Cambridge University, UK)
* Heather Miller (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
* Nuno Preguiça (NOVA-LINCS & NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal)
* Marco Serafini (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
* Marc Shapiro (Sorbonne-Universités—LIP6 & Inria, France)
* Justin Sheehy (Akamai Technologies, USA)