WDMS 2002


Program Co-Chairs
Priya Narasimhan
Carnegie-Mellon University
Pascal Felber
Bell Labs, Lucent

Program Committee
Dave Bakken
Wash. State Univ., Pullman
Roy Friedman
Technion, Israel
Benoit Garbinato
Sun Microsystems
Rachid Guerraoui
EPFL, Switzerland
Isabelle Rouvellou
IBM Research, New York
Rick Schantz
BBN Technologies
Doug C. Schmidt
UC, Irvine & DARPA

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on Dependable Middleware-Based Systems

June 23-26, 2002
Washington, D.C.

Part of the
Dependable Systems and Networks Conference (DSN) 2002


Middleware technologies, such as CORBA, Java, EJB and Jini, are becoming increasingly popular for building both embedded and enterprise applications. While middleware infrastructures exhibit attractive features (such as portability, interoperability, etc.) from an application development perspective, they are still lacking in robustness and reliability. Thus, while middleware is gaining adoption is most application domains, there is still some reluctance in deploying middleware in mission-critical systems with high dependability requirements. This has led, over the past few years, to several academic and industrial research efforts aimed at correcting this deficiency. For the most part, these research efforts have been independent of each other, and have often focussed on specific pieces of the dependability puzzle. However, the puzzle is far from complete; for example, issues such as non-determinism in middleware are yet to be dealt with. Our aim, in this Workshop, is to bring researchers and practitioners (and therefore, some of the pieces of the puzzle) together, to further our insights on dependable middleware, and to investigate collectively the challenges that remain.

Future research on middleware systems will focus on not just dependability, but many other "-ilities", such as survivability, adaptability, scalability, availability, mobility, security, real-time, etc. Marrying dependability with any other "-ility" is a non-trivial task, and requires analyzing various trade-offs; for instance, how can we reconcile the very different multi-threading/scheduling/ordering requirements of fault tolerance and real-time, respectively, within a single middleware infrastructure? Research on reliable middleware will have to address such challenges in composing dependability with several other "-ilities" in order to build useful real-world systems.

The purpose of this one-day workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia to discuss the latest practices in building dependable middleware-based and distributed object-based systems, to explore ways of making today's middleware technologies more robust, and to investigate the enhancement of existing reliable middleware with other "-ilities".

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The Workshop solicits contributions on topics related to, but not limited to, the following:
  • Experiences with reliability in middleware infrastructures (e.g., CORBA, DCOM, Java RMI, EJB)
  • Coping with non-determinism in reliable middleware systems
  • Lessons learned in building/using dependable middleware: what works, what doesn't
  • Integrating dependable embedded and enterprise middleware systems
  • Trade-offs in adding other "-ilities" (survivability, adaptability, scalability, availability, mobility, security, real-time, etc.) to reliable middleware infrastructures
  • Integration of dependability into formal distributed object models
  • Shaping/enhancing standards for fault-tolerant middleware
  • Evaluating dependability for middleware applications
  • Limitations of existing fault tolerance technologies in the context of middleware applications

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

Position papers are solicited from potential participants of this workshop. Papers must be written in English and printed using at least 11-point type and 1-1/2 line spacing, and can be one of two possible types:
  • Papers presenting research results, of 5-15 pages in length, including figures
  • Papers presenting position statements, of 3-5 pages in length, from potential participants, who prefer to serve as panelists or commentators.
Accepted workshop contributions (written material) will be published in the Supplement of the 2002 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks.

Authors are requested to submit an electronic version (PostScript or PDF) of an abstract (max. 1 page) before January 31, 2002 to the following address: priya@cs.cmu.edu

Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their abstracts by March 1, 2002.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • January 31, 2002 : Deadline for submission of 1 page abstract
  • March 1, 2002 : Notification of acceptance
  • March 20, 2002 : Deadline for manuscripts of accepted papers

Questions & comments on this website to priya@cs.cmu.edu