SIGMETRICS ANNUAL REPORT
July 1994 - June 1995

Submitted By: Linda S. Wright

1. Publications

SIGMETRICS published one regular issue of PER (Performance Evaluation Review) and one special issue containing the proceedings of the annual conference. Typically PER contains:

a book review column with detailed reviews of publications in our field,
calls for related conferences and journals,
industry standard benchmark data (e.g., TPC) and other measurement data that may be useful to our membership, and
miscellaneous articles submitted by the membership.

We continued our electronic bulletin board, as an informal means of communication between our members. Approximately 600 people are on the bulletin board's current distribution list.

2. Special Projects

We have contacted many of the performance-oriented standards bodies to explore publication of their standards and benchmark results in PER.

3. Conference Highlights

Our annual conference was held May 15-19 in Ottawa, Canada and was co-sponsored by IFIP Working Group 7.3. The conference consisted of the following:

15 tutorials (held over a period of 2 days),
27 technical papers (presented, single track, during 2.5 days),
7 Hot Topics sessions (held, in parallel, during 2 sessions)
11 poster sessions,
a Work in Progress session,
a large book display, and
a Town Meeting.

The Hot Topics sessions were a new conference feature this year and were well received. We plan to have similar sessions next year.

At our Town Meeting it was suggested that we eventually do away with our quarterly hard-copy newsletter, PER, and replace it with communication via the World Wide Web.

The conference was attended by 201 people, and preliminary estimates are that it was financially successful.

4. Awards

Best Paper awards were presented at our annual conference for the following three (3) papers:

John Chapin, Stephen A. Herrod, Mendel Rosenblum, Anoop Gupta (Stanford University), "Memory System Performance of UNIX on CC-NUMA Multiprocessors"
Anwar Elwalid (AT&T Bell Laboratories), Daniel Heyman and T.V. Lakshman (Bell Communications Research), Debasis Mitra and Alan Weiss (AT&T Bell Laboratories), "Fundamental Results on the Performance of ATM Multiplexers with Applications to Video Teleconferencing"
Pei Cao and Edward W. Felten (Princeton University), Anna R. Karlin (University of Washington), Kai Li (Princeton University), "A Study of Integrated Prefetching and Caching Strategies"

5. Educational Activities

We continued to support (jointly with the Computer Measurement Group, CMG) a project at Vanderbilt University which produces condensed problem set booklets which illustrate performance issues in various mainstream Computer Science courses. We call these booklets "Performance Supplements" to X, where X may be Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Computer Architecture, Databases, etc. "P.S. to Operating Systems" was published by Prentice-Hall in 1993. "P.S. to Computer Architecture" was sent to Prentice-Hall in early 1995 for review. We expect to finalize it this summer. An outline of problems for "P.S. to Computer Networks" is planned to be available in draft form by October, 1995.

6. International Initiatives

Traditionally SIGMETRICS has a joint conference with IFIP WG 7.3 every third year. We continued that tradition in 1995. The joint conference was held May 15-19 in Ottawa, Canada.

7. Collaborative Efforts

SIGMETRICS has had a long term relationship with CMG (the Computer Measurement Group), another independent non-profit society dedicated to computer performance. As mentioned in paragraph 5 above, SIGMETRICS and CMG co-sponsor the development of the P.S. series of booklets. Also, typically CMG's Computer Science Advisory Committee (which recommends CMG Fellowship award winners) is comprised largely of SIGMETRICS members. CMG and SIGMETRICS complement each another by serving the needs of different computer performance professionals: managers and analysts (CMG) and researchers (SIGMETRICS).

SIGMETRICS is an "in cooperation" sponsor of the 6th International Workshop on Petri Nets and Performance Models, which will be held at Duke University, October 3-6, 1995.

SIGMETRICS is co-sponsoring, with SIGCOMM, SIGOPS, SIGACT, and CESDIS NASA, the First International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, which will be held November 13-15, 1995 in Berkeley, CA.

With SIGSIM and SIGARCH, SIGMETRICS is an "in cooperation" sponsor of the International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer & Telecommunications Systems (MASCOTS), which will be held February 1-3, 1996 in San Jose, CA.

Our 1996 conference will be held as part of the 1996 Federated Computing Research Conference. The agreement has been signed and planning is underway.

8. Outstanding Volunteer Efforts

We have not called out any particular individuals for outstanding performance, but I do wish to note that Murray Woodside did an outstanding job (as General Chair) of organizing our successful 1995 conference.

9. Concerns

Our two concerns continue to be:

How to balance between theory and practice in the technical program at the annual conference?
How to get together with other SIGs whose subject matter is the focus of our performance studies? (We are starting to address this by sponsoring some joint workshops and conferences.)
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SIGMETRICS ANNUAL REPORT July 1994 - June 1995