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FOREWORD

It is with great pleasure we welcome you to PDCS 2011 in Dallas, Texas. This is another very successful PDCS Conference and we are glad you could join us.  During the past three decades the area of parallel and distributed computing has seen tremendous growth in many different directions. This growth is not slowing down. The cloud, multicore CPUs and GPUs, wireless devices, etc. are having tremendous impact and are transforming the area of parallel and distributed systems in ways we did not envision even three or four years ago. These technologies and advances arrive at an unprecedented pace to the market. They provide a fertile and exciting ground for the continuous development of the parallel and distributed computing field. We are now seeing relatively inexpensive computing devices with multicores as well as sophisticated computing systems with a couple of thousands of processors. Therefore, it is not difficult to predict that the area of parallel and distributed computing will continue to have a bright future.

PDCS is a major forum for scientists, engineers, researchers, and practitioners to meet, and exchange ideas on new developments, current trends and future directions. We hope that your interactions at the conference will be fruitful and will extend for many more years. 

We have prepared for you an outstanding program covering most aspects of parallel and distributed computing systems. The conference includes about 70 paper presentations organized in several sessions. There were 107 papers submitted, so the acceptance rate was about 66%. All the papers accepted to PDCS are good papers. However, about 20% of the papers were nominated for the Best Papers Awards. Three Best Paper Awards (for three different research areas) will be presented at the Banquet. The Best Papers were selected before the conference with all the information we had at that time.

There are conferences with a 20% or lower acceptance rate. However, this rate does not imply that the papers accepted are all high calibre papers.  At a recent “prestigious” low-acceptance rate conference it was observed that only five papers were rated at the accept level or above.  It is a well-known fact that in almost all conferences there are normally a handful of outstanding papers and about 30% of the papers submitted are unacceptable. The rest of the papers are all equivalent.  Since the reviewing process is not always a fair process, especially because of time constraints and the various opinions and research speciality of the reviewers, it is very difficult to distinguish between the worst papers accepted and the best papers rejected. After many years of having low acceptance rates, the conference organizers are beginning to realize the benefit of moving away from their low acceptance rate model into a model similar to ours, which we have been following for years. We had many more than five papers with an “accept” or above review rate, but there were papers accepted whose average review rate was below the accept level. In those cases we took a closer look at the reviews and the papers, and who had reviewed those papers. We partition all the papers into four broad categories: theoretical, conceptual, applications, experimentation (in real and simulated environments). The reviews continue to favour one group of papers over the others, so adjustments have to be made from the reviewers’ evaluations. Many reviewers tend to reject almost all their papers assigned and their reasoning is not always correct. But, we also have reviewers that provide an excellent feedback in a timely fashion. This year we want to honour one of those outstanding reviewers. This year’s recipient of the Best Reviewer Award is Dr. Erik D’Hollander from Ghent University in Belgium. He has been an outstanding reviewer for PDCS for over a decade. We are grateful to all the program committee members for their timely and thoughtful reviews; without their help it would not have been possible to come up with our program.

PDCS continues to be a truly international conference, as the Program Committee and authors are drawn from multiple countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and (North and South) America.  We are thankful to Dr. Drissa Hourtra from the Orange Labs (France) for being his Special Session on “Cloud Computing”. Dr. Sandro Fiore from the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change (CMCC), will present the tutorial "Grid Database Management: the GRelC Middleware and Its Applications in the Environmental Context”. This year we have two Keynote Speakers. Professor Hamid R. Arabnia, from the University of Georgia (USA) will present his Keynote entitled “A reconfigurable Communication Technology”. Professor Si Qing Zheng, from the University of Texas at Dallas, will present his Keynote entitled “Optimal and Near Optima Multicast Switching Networks”.

The conference has benefited enormously from the continued support and sponsorship by the International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED). We hope IASTED will continue to sponsor this conference for decades to come.  Finally, we would like to thank the IASTED staff, especially Ms. Karen Lee, Conference Planner, for their extraordinary effort organizing the conference, monitoring the massive reviewing process, and taking care of the thousands of issues that arise while trying to organize a conference of this magnitude.

Dr. Teofilo F. Gonzalez
Conference Chair
PDCS 2011