[hpc-announce] Call for Papers - Seventh International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC) 2021

[Vatche Ishakian]

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Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this CFP
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Over the last seven years, Serverless Computing (Serverless) has gained an
enthusiastic following in industry as a compelling paradigm for the
deployment of cloud applications, and is enabled by the recent shift of
enterprise application architectures to containers and microservices. Many
of the major cloud vendors have released serverless platforms, including
Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM Cloud
Functions. Open source projects are gaining popularity in providing
serverless computing as a service.

Recently, Kubernetes gained in popularity in enterprise and in academia.
Several open source projects such as OpenFaaS and Knative aim to provide
developers with serverless experience on top of Kubernetes by hiding
low-level details. Auto-scalable Multi-tenant Kubernetes deployments like
Google Cloud Run or IBM Code Engine also overcome previous limitations of
Serverless Functions like duration, networking, and higher granularity
(more vCPUs).

Serverless architectures offer different tradeoffs in terms of control,
cost, and flexibility compared to distributed applications built on an
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) substrate. For example, a serverless
architecture requires developers to more carefully consider the resources
used by their code (time to execute, memory used, etc.) when modularizing
their applications. This is in contrast to concerns around latency,
scalability, and elasticity, which is where significant development effort
has traditionally been spent when building cloud services. In addition,
tools and techniques to monitor and debug applications aren't applicable in
serverless architectures, and new approaches are needed. As well, test and
development pipelines may need to be adapted. Another decision that
developers face is the appropriateness of the serverless ecosystem to their
application requirements. A rich ecosystem of services built into the
platform is typically easier to compose and would offer better performance.
However, composing external services may be unavoidable, and in such cases,
many of the benefits of serverless disappear, including performance and
availability guarantees. This presents an important research challenge, and
it is not clear how existing results and best practices, such as workflow
composition research, can be applied to composition in a serverless
environment.

As this year the workshop is virtual and we are looking not only for
research papers, experience papers, demonstrations, or position papers but
also for live presentations of ongoing work, demonstrations, and anything
else that may be interesting to workshop audience.

The latest version of this CFP is available at
http://serverlesscomputing.org/wosc7/

Topics
This workshop solicits papers from both academia and industry on the state
of practice and state of the art in serverless computing. Topics of
interest include but are not limited to:

Infrastructure and network optimizations for serverless applications
Debugging serverless applications
Programming models
Use cases, experiences
Benchmarks
Cost models, pricing models, and economics of serverless
DevOps
Other topics related to serverless computing
Important Dates
Paper Submission: September 12, 2021
Notification of Acceptance: September 30, 2021
Final Camera-Ready Manuscript (Hard Deadline): October 10, 2021
Non-paper submissions (demos and other proposals): November 10, 2021
Author registration deadline: TBD
Conference: December 6-10, 2021

Papers and Submissions
Papers submissions
Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research/application
papers that are not being considered in another forum.

Submitted manuscripts should be structured as technical papers and may not
exceed six (6) single-spaced double-column pages using ACM SIGPLAN style,
which can be found on the ACM template page. The page limit contains all
the content, including bibliography, appendix, etc.

Submitted papers must adhere to the formatting instructions of the ACM
SIGPLAN style, which can be found on the ACM template page. The font size
has to be set to 10pt.

Note that submissions must be double-blind: authors’ names must not appear,
and authors must make a good faith attempt to anonymize their submissions.
The Middleware conference organizers will provide companion proceedings
including all workshop papers, which will be available in the ACM Digital
Library. This is subject to the availability of their camera-ready papers
by October 10, 2021.

Authors should submit the manuscript in PDF format. All manuscripts will be
reviewed and will be judged on correctness, originality, technical
strength, rigour in analysis, quality of results, quality of presentation,
and interest and relevance to the conference attendees. Papers conforming
to the above guidelines can be submitted through the paper submission
system powered by HotCRP (https://wosc7.hotcrp.com/).
All submitted manuscripts (following MIDDLEWARE conference requirements on
formatting and page limits) will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 program
committee members. Accepted papers with confirmed presentation will appear
in the conference proceedings as well as in the ACM Digital Library.

Other submissions
Authors are invited to submit proposals for demos and other presentations
that are not papers.

Proposals must be submitted as short abstracts (not longer than one page)
in PDF format using the paper submission system HotCRP (
https://wosc7.hotcrp.com/).

Accepted presentations will not be part of the conference proceedings but
will be part of the workshop agenda with dedicated time for live
presentation (with video backup), questions etc.
Workshop co-chairs
Paul Castro, IBM Research
Pedro García López, University Rovira i Virgili
Vatche Ishakian, IBM Research
Vinod Muthusamy, IBM Research
Aleksander Slominski, IBM Research

Steering Committee
Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University
Dennis Gannon, Indiana University & Formerly Microsoft Research
Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)
Program Committee (tentative)
Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Azer Bestavros, Boston University
Tyler R. Caraza-Harter, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Flavio Esposito, Saint Louis University
Rodrigo Fonseca, Brown University
Ian Foster, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University
Dennis Gannon, Indiana University & Formerly Microsoft Research
Pedro Garcia Lopez, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain)
Volker Hilt, Bell Labs (Nokia)
Alexandru Iosup, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Arno Jacobsen, MSRG (Middleware Systems Research Group)
Ali Kanso, Microsoft
Wes Lloyd, University of Washington Tacoma
Maciej Malawski, AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
Lucas Nussbaum, LORIA, France
Maciej Pawlik, Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET of the University of
Science and Technology in Cracow
Per Persson, Ericsson Research
Peter Pietzuch, Imperial College
Rodric Rabbah, Nimbella and Apache OpenWhisk
Eric Rozner, University of Colorado Boulder
Josef Spillner, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Rich Wolski, University of California, Santa Barbara