HPTS 2015

I've been so busy travelling to conferences and customer engagements that I haven't had a chance to write about my trip to HPTS 2015. I've written several times about previous trips to this workshop and how it's my favourite of them all, so won't repeat. The workshop had the usual high standard of presentations and locating it at Asilomar is always a great way to focus the mind and conversations.

Because of its highly technical nature of the workshop I always like to use this event to try out new presentations - I know the feedback I receive will be constructive and worth hearing. This time my submission was essentially about what I'd written earlier this year concerning the evolution of application servers (application containers) driven by immutability and operating system containers, such as Docker. And I threw in a smattering of microservices since the topic is obviously relevant and I figured Adrian would be there! My presentation was well received and the feedback clearly showed that many people at the event agreed with it.

One other positive thing to come from the workshop and my presentation was that my co-traveller and long time friend/colleague, Professor Shrivastava, saw the presentation for the first time at the event. He understood it and whilst much of what was said I and others take for granted, he believes that there are groups of people that would find it interesting enough that we should write a paper. Writing papers with Santosh is something I enjoy and it has been a very fruitful collaboration over the years, so I look forward to this!

I also want to thank James because it was our discussions after I started my initial entries on the evolution of application servers that helped to focus and clarify my thinking.

HPTS 2013

Just back from a JCP-EC meeting, JavaOne and HPTS. Whilst I enjoyed them all, HPTS has to be my favourite. Unfortunately this year its schedule conflicted with JavaOne so I wasn't able to attend either event fully. But even just the 3 days that I was at HPTS were well worth the trip: it's a great workshop where you get the chance to meet people from all areas of our industry and talk without fear of confidentiality. "What's said at HPTS stays at HPTS".

I had the privilege of presenting again this year, on the topic of transactions, NoSQL and Big Data. I was also chairing a session immediately afterwards on a range of topics including hardware transactional memory. Overall the sessions are great, but it's the dinner and drink discussions that are the real value around the workshop. And it's a great chance to catch up with friends I tend to only see once every two years!

HPTS 2013 CfP

15th International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS)
September 22-25, 2013
Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, CA
http://hpts.ws

Every two years, HPTS brings together a lively and opinionated group of participants to discuss and debate the pressing topics that affect today's systems and their design and implementation, especially where scalability is concerned. The workshop includes position paper presentations, panels, moderated discussions, and significant time for casual interaction. And of course beer.

Since its inception in 1985, HPTS has always been about large scale. Over the years the focus has shifted from scalable transaction processing to very large databases to cloud computing. Today, scalability is about big data. What interesting but out-of-the-spotlight big-data applications are out there? How are datacenter software and hardware abstractions evolving to support big data apps? How has big data changed the role of data stewardship‹not just data security, but data provenance and dealing with noisy data? How are big data apps affected by limitations in energy consumption? What advances have occurred in identifying patterns and even approximate schemas at petabyte scale? How have the provisioning of networking, storage and computing in datacenters had to shift to support these apps?

We ask potential participants to submit a brief technical summary or position, presenting a viewpoint on a controversial topic, a summary of lessons learned, experience with a large or unusual system, an innovative mechanism, an enormous problem looming on the horizon, or anything else that convinces the program committee that the participant has something interesting to say. The submission process is purposely lightweight, but we require each submission to have only a single author.

The workshop is by invitation only and is limited to under 100 participants. The submissions drive both the invitation process and the workshop agenda. Participants may be asked to be part of a presentation or discussion session at the workshop. Students are particularly encouraged to submit.

What to submit:
A 1 page position statement or extended abstract
Optional: the written submission can include a link to one or both of the following as an expanded part of the submission:
Maximum of 3 PowerPoint-type slides
 Maximum 2 minute video presentation ‹can be of you speaking with or without slides, a video demo or other video illustration of your proposed presentation, etc.
  Even if you choose NOT to submit these, the PC may decide to ask you for them later during consideration of submissions.
The length limits will be strictly observed. We won't consider too-long submissions.

How to submit:  Go to http://bit.ly/hpts2013submit

When to submit:  Now would be good. Official deadlines are:
Submission of Papers:  March 11, 2013
Notification of Acceptance:  May 24, 2013
HPTS Workshop:  September 22-25, 2013

Organizing committee:  Pat Helland, Salesforce; Pat Selinger, IBM (General Chair); Shel Finkelstein, SAP; Mark Little, Red Hat

Program committee
Anastasia Ailamaki, EPFL
David Cheriton, Arista Networks/Stanford
Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix
Bill Coughran, Sequoia Capital
Armando Fox, UC Berkeley (Chair)
Sergey Melnik, Google
Adam Messinger, Twitter
Margo Seltzer, Harvard
Wang-Chiew Tan, UC Santa Cruz

Poster session chair
Michael Armbrust, Google