News
- The workshop proceedings are available in the ACM Digital Library.
- The HotSWUp workshop will be open for public participation. We encourage all OOPSLA attendees to join us on Monday, in room 107, and discuss the current hot topics in software ugrades.
- The program is final.
- Clarification: in the "one-minute madness" session, we have allocated one minute per paper and NOT one minute per author/attendee. This session will be 10-min long.
- We have posted the preliminary program.
- The notifications have been sent. Submissions of camera-ready papers are open.
- The workshop was moved to Monday, October 20th
- Submissions are now closed.
- Deadline extended until Monday, July 28, 11:59 PM (Apia time).
- Submissions are now open.
Overview
The goal of HotSWUp is to identify cutting-edge research ideas for implementing software upgrades. Actively-used software is upgraded regularly to incorporate bug fixes and security patches or to keep up with the evolving requirements. Whether upgrades are applied offline or online, they significantly impact the software's performance and reliability. Recently-introduced commercial products aim to address various aspects of this problem, e.g., programing language/framework/middleware support for online upgrade, large-scale dissemination of fine-grained updates, live data migration in storage-area networks. However, recent studies and a large body of anecdotal evidence suggest that, in practice, upgrades remain failure-prone, tedious, and expensive.
HotSWUp is an inter-disciplinary workshop, based on synergies among the domains of programming languages (e.g., as reflected at conferences such as OOPSLA or PLDI), software engineering (e.g., as reflected at ICSE or FSE) and systems (e.g., as reflected at SOSP or OSDI). By seeking contributions from both academic researchers and industry practitioners, HotSWUp aims to combine bold, novel ideas, with experience from upgrading real systems.
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Programming language / runtime system / operating system support for software upgrades.
- Improving the reliability of upgrades (e.g., support for upgrade validation and for rollback after failures).
- Support for system restructuring (e.g., evolving APIs, changes to database schemas).
- Identifying dependencies between components and guaranteeing safe interactions among mixed versions.
- Coordinating and disseminating upgrades in large-scale distributed systems.
- Tools for preparing, testing, and applying software upgrades.
- Human factors in software upgrades (e.g., usability of upgrading tools, common operator mistakes).
Program
The workshop's proceedings are available in the ACM Digital Library.
Submission Guidelines
We solicit position papers on software upgrades. Preferably, submissions should fall into one of the following categories:
- Suggest how a successful approach can be applied in a different context (e.g., static dependency-analysis applied to distributed-system upgrades).
- Refute an old assumption about software upgrades (e.g., by presenting negative results).
- Describe a new problem or propose a novel solution to an old problem.
- Present empirical evidence related to the practical implementation of software upgrades.
All papers must be submitted electronically, in PDF format, at http://www.hotswup.org. Submissions must not exceed 5 pages, in the ACM SIGPLAN 10 point format. Templates for Word and LaTeX are available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigplan/authorInformation.htm. The workshop proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
Important Dates
Submission deadline | 28 July 2008 |
Acceptance notification | 7 September 2008 |
Camera-ready deadline | 5 October 2008 |
Workshop day |
Organizers
Program Co-Chairs
Tudor Dumitraş, Carnegie Mellon University (main contact)
Danny Dig, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Iulian Neamtiu, University of California, Riverside
Program Committee
Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers University, USA
Gavin Bierman, Microsoft Research, UK
Dilma da Silva, IBM Research, USA
Stéphane Ducasse, INRIA, France
Michael Ernst, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Ralph Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Priya Narasimhan, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Manuel Oriol, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Mark E. Segal, Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences, USA
Peter Sewell, Cambridge University, UK
Robert Wisniewski, IBM Research, USA
Original Call for Papers
Printable call for papers: [PDF]