SIGMETRICS Annual Report

July, 1995 - June, 1996
Submitted by: Larry Dowdy

1. Publications

SIGMETRICS published one special issue of PER (Performance Evaluation Review), Volume 24, 1 (May, 1996), 279 pages. This issue consisted of the proceedings of the annual conference.

The SIGMETRICS electronic bulletin board remains very active. This is a monitored bulletin board administered by Pat Worley, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This bulletin board currently has 616 subscribers. Typical postings include: calls for conference and journal papers, surveys, advance conference programs, employment opportunities, contents of recent books, book reviews and recommendations, miscellaneous queries and requests regarding performance related issues, seminar announcements, announcements of performance tools, and benchmark/measurement data. This past year, 148 messages were distributed. By monitoring the postings and eliminating messages that do not have wide appeal, this bulletin board is providing an effective communication forum for many members.

2. Special Projects

Efforts have begun to develop an enhanced presence of SIGMETRICS via the World Wide Web. Home pages providing membership information, meeting announcements, benchmark data, technical reports, and employment announcements, are underway. It is expected that this effort will eventually replace the need for a hard-copy version of PER.

This year, the SIGMETRICS conference submission process was conducted electronically. Several Perl and Tcl/Tk scripts were developed to manage submissions, reviews, and reports. It is planned that this software will be made available to help future SIG conference organizers. David Nicol, now at Dartmouth University, deserves special credit for this effort.

3. Conference Highlights

The annual SIGMETRICS conference was held May 23-26, 1996 in Philadelphia as part of the Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC). The main conference highlights included:

11 tutorials,
24 full technical papers (110 submitted papers),
6 poster papers,
a Work in Progress session, and
a Town Meeting.

The acceptance ratio (22%) of technical papers indicates the continued high standards of the conference. Special efforts were made to balance theory and practice oriented papers. These efforts were successful. At the Town Meeting a discussion took place examining the desirability of changing the name of SIGMETRICS to an alternative (e.g., SIGPERF, SIGPERFORM, SIGPERFORMANCE). The consensus opinion was to retain the SIGMETRICS name. There was uniform agreement to expand our electronic services and to replace PER hard-copy with a WWW version. It was felt that the "experiment" of having SIGMETRICS as part of the FCRC was positive and that there was support for holding future joint meetings. The conference was attended by approximately 150 attendees. Preliminary estimates are that the conference was financially successful.

4. Awards

Two (2) Best Integration of Systems and Theory Awards were presented at the annual conference for their paper submissions:

Mor Harchol-Balter and Allen Downey (University of California at Berkeley), "Exploiting Process Lifetime Distributions for Dynamic Load Balancing"
James Salehi, Zhi-Li Zhang, James Kurose, and Don Towsley (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), "Supporting Stored Video: Reducing Rate Variability and End-to-End Resource Requirements through Optimal Smoothing"

It is noted with pleasure that the primary authors on both of these papers are graduate students.

The Best Simulation Paper Award was presented at the annual conference, with the winning paper being forwarded to the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) for consideration:

Albert Greenberg (AT&T Research), Scott Shenker (Xerox PARC), and Alexander Stolyar (Motorola), "Asynchronous Updates in Large Parallel Systems"

5. Educational Activities

SIGMETRICS and the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) continue to support a project at Vanderbilt University which produces a series of booklets illustrating performance issues as they relate to various mainstream computer science courses. These booklets are called "Performance Supplements to X", where X may be Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Computer Architecture, or Databases. "P.S. to Operating Systems" was published by Prentice-Hall in 1993. "P.S. to Computer Architecture" is to be published soon by Prentice-Hall. An outline of problems for "P.S. to Computer Networks" has been drafted.

6. International Initiatives

SIGMETRICS has a special relationship with IFIP WG 7.3. Traditionally, a joint conference is held every three years. The last such joint conference was held in Ottawa, Canada, in May, 1995. Preliminary planning is taking place for a 1998 joint conference.

7. Collaborative Efforts

SIGMETRICS traditionally enjoys a special relationship with the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), another independent non-profit professional society dedicated to computer performance. In addition to encouraging the P.S. series, CMG's Computer Science Advisory Committee (which recommends CMG Fellowship award winners) is typically comprised largely of SIGMETRICS members. These two organizations complement each other by serving both practicing managers/analysts and researchers/educators.

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

SIGMETRICS was a co-sponsor, with SIGCOMM, SIGOPS, SIGACT, and CESDIS NASA, for the First International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'95), which was held in Berkeley, November 13-15, 1995.

SIGMETRICS was an "in cooperation" sponsor of the International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer & Telecommunications Systems (MASCOTS)'96, with SIGSIM and SIGARCH, which was held in San Jose, February 1-3, 1996.

SIGMETRICS was an "in cooperation" sponsor of the 29th Annual Simulation Symposium, with SIGSIM which was held in New Orleans, March 31 - April 4, 1996.

SIGMETRICS sponsored the Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Tools, which was held in Philadelphia, May 22-23, 1996.

The annual SIGMETRICS conference was part of the 1996 Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC), which was held in Philadelphia, May 23-26, 1996.

SIGMETRICS was an "in cooperation" sponsor of the Fourth Annual Workshop on Input/Output in Parallel and Distributed Systems (IOPADS), with IEEE-TCOS which was held in Philadelphia, May 27-28, 1996.

8. Outstanding Volunteer Efforts

The following individuals are noted for their outstanding volunteer efforts:

Dan Reed, General Chair, SIGMETRICS'96
David Nicol, Program Chair, SIGMETRICS'96 and developer of the electronic submission software
Pat Worley, Bulletin Board Director

9. Concerns

The primary concerns within SIGMETRICS are:

How can we better interact with other organizations (e.g., special interest groups within ACM and IEEE) where performance issues naturally arise?
How can we best exploit and develop various WWW services?
How should we best address membership issues?

10. SIG Program Plan

The following summarizes future plans:

Continue to support our annual conference.
Continue to promote the balance between theory and practice within the performance evaluation community.
Promote and encourage joint efforts with other groups interested in systems (e.g., CMG, SIGARCH, SIGOPS, SIGSIM, SIGCOMM, IEEE-TCOS, IFIPS) by sponsoring appropriate technical meetings.
Address the future of PER, possibly encouraging special issues that are organized by guest editors.
Develop a broad set of services via the WWW.
Encourage educational initiatives such as the P.S. series.
Continue the bulletin board and encourage various categories of postings.
11. Listing of Computer and Other Equipment Purchases
None.
Respectfully submitted by
Larry Dowdy, Chair, SIGMETRICS

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