Generative Programming and Component Engineering for
QoS Provisioning in Distributed Systems

GPCE4QoS

October 23, 2006
Portland, Oregon USA

A GPCE 2006 workshop

Overview and Topics of Interest

Large-scale, distributed systems form the basis of safety- and mission-critical applications, such as air traffic control, industrial process automation, financial systems, nuclear reactors, oil refineries, power grids, telecommunication networks, inventory management systems, military systems and patient monitoring systems. These systems comprise many interdependent artifacts, such as network/bus interconnects, many coordinated local and remote end systems, and multiple layers of software. Such systems demand multiple, simultaneous, predictable performance characteristics, such as end-to-end latency and throughput along with other quality of service (QoS) concerns, such as reliability, fault tolerance and security. All these issues become highly volatile in large-scale distributed systems due to the dynamic interplay of the many interconnected parts that are constructed from smaller parts.

Economic considerations and the advances in contemporary middleware technologies, such as Web services, J2EE, .NET and CORBA Component Model has led to the emergence of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). In SOA, large-scale distributed systems are realized by choreographies of loosely coupled disparate services that realize the functionality of distributed systems. Despite the advances in these available technologies, several challenges arise when these technologies are used to realize complex distributed systems with multiple QoS requirements. Arguably, these different but often simultaneous QoS requirements are tangled with each other and crosscut different layers of middleware and the services that realize these systems. The different dimensions of QoS are often at odds with each other, e.g., high degree of fault tolerance can have substantial impact on the timeliness and performance of an application.

There is a strong need to develop new tools and techniques over the entire lifecycle of the systems, which will evaluate different facets of system QoS for composable distributed systems. Addressing these challenges will require the envisioned tools and techniques to model, analyze and provision QoS in the systems along two dimensions: (1) vertically, i.e., along the dimension of the composition and configuration of the middleware and network infrastructure used to host individual services, and (2) horizontally, i.e., along the dimension of the packaging, assembly and deployment of system components and services that form the distributed system.

Generative programming and component engineering is a promising technology to address these challenges. Already it is playing an important role in the assembly, configuration and deployment lifecycle stages of these distributed systems. This workshop seeks to explore new ideas in the use of generative programming and component engineering for addressing the several unresolved challenges in meeting the QoS demands of large-scale distributed systems. The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for international experts to discuss issues related to the role of generative programming and component engineering in QoS provisioning of large-scale distributed systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• The role of GPCE in QoS provisioning across all phases of the software lifecycle
• Domain-specific modeling languages and model transformations for QoS provisioning
• QoS modeling and analysis allowing tradeoffs along different QoS dimensions
• Generative programming for QoS validation and verification tools in distributed systems
• Role of aspect-oriented program transformation techniques in QoS provisioning
• Reflection and metaprogramming as techniques for adaptive QoS provisioning
• Generative programming in different forms of computing e.g., grid
• Generative programming for performance optimizations leveraging new hardware architectures, such as multi cores.

Workshop Schedule, Accepted Papers, Presentations, and Photos

Date: October 23, 2006
Time: 8:30am-5:00pm
Meeting Room: C128

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Other participants of  the workshop were:

    Nelly Bencomo

    Eric Eide

    Arundhati Kogekar

    Ram

    Dimple Kaul

Program Committee

The Program Committee for GPCE4QoS is:

Mikhail Auguston, Naval Postgraduate School (USA)
Riccardo Bettati, Texas A&M University (USA)
Yvonne Coady, University of Victoria (Canada)
Eric Eide, University of Utah (USA)
Chris Gill, Washington University (USA)
Swapna Gokhale, University of Connecticut (USA)
Joe Loyall, BBN Technologies (USA)
Priya Narasimhan, Carnegie-Mellon University (USA)
Dorina Petriu, Carleton University (Canada)
Rajeev Raje, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)
Olaf Spinczyk, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany)
Charles Zhang, University of Toronto (Canada)

Workshop Organizers

The workshop organizers may be contacted by sending an email to  gpce-qos (at) cis.uab.edu

Aniruddha S. Gokhale
Institute for Software Integrated Systems
Dept of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Vanderbilt University
Box 1829 Station B
Nashville, TN 37235
Phone: (615) 322-8754
Email: a.gokhale (at) vanderbilt.edu
URL: www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~gokhale

Jeff Gray
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
126 Campbell Hall
1300 University Boulevard
Birmingham AL 35294-1170
Phone: (+1) 205-934-8643
Email: gray (at) cis.uab.edu
URL: http://www.cis.uab.edu/gray