PLACES09

Applications on the web today are built using numerous interacting services; soon off-the-shelf CPUs will host thousands of cores, and sensor networks will be composed from a large number of processing units. Many normal applications will soon need to make effective use of thousands of computing nodes. At some level of granularity, computation in such systems will be inherently concurrent and communication-centred.

To exploit and harness the richness of this computing environment, designers and programmers will utilise a rich variety of programming paradigms, depending on the shape of the data and control flow. Plausible candidates for such paradigms include structured imperative concurrent programming, stream-based programming, concurrent functions with queues, and the use of types for communication and data structures (such as session types and linear types), to name but a few. Combinations of these abstractions will be used even in a single application, and the runtime environment needs to ensure seamless execution without relying on differences in available resources such as the number of cores.

The development of effective programming methodologies for the coming computing paradigm demands exploration and understanding of a wide variety of ideas and techniques. This workshop aims to offer a forum where researchers from different fields exchange new ideas on one of the central challenges for programming in the near future, the development of programming methodologies and infrastructures where concurrency and distribution are the norm rather than a marginal concern.

Topics of Interest
Submissions are invited in the general area of foundations of programming languages for concurrency and distribution. Specific topics include: language design and implementations, program analysis, session types, multicore programming, concurrent data types, web services, novel programming methodologies for sensor networks, integration of sequential and concurrent programming, and runtime architectures including resource allocation. Papers are welcome which present novel and valuable ideas as well as experiences.

Submissions
Authors are invited to submit a title and a 200 word abstract by 13th January 2009 to help the PC chairs assign reviewers to papers. Preliminary papers of up to five pages in length should be submitted in PDF format by 18th January using the EasyChair proceedings template available at:

http://www.easychair.org/easychair.zip

Abstracts and full papers should be submitted using EasyChair:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=places2009

Preliminary proceedings will be available at the workshop. We will publish a post-proceedings in either ENTCS or the BCS (British Computer Society) Electronic Workshops in Computing.

Enquiries can be sent to:

places-workshop@cl.cam.ac.uk.

Invited Speakers

 * Professor Vivek Sarkar
 * E.D. Butcher Professor of Computer Science, Rice University

Important Dates

 * Abstract (title & 200 words max): 13th January 2009
 * Paper Submission: 23:59 (GMT) 18th January 2009
 * Paper Notification: 1st February 2009
 * Camera Ready: 15th February 2009

Committees

 * Conference Chairman
 * has general chair::Alastair Beresford (University of Cambridge)
 * has general chair::Simon Gay (University of Glasgow)
 * Programm Commitee:
 * has PC member::Kohei Honda (Queen Mary University of London)
 * has PC member::Greg Morrisett (Harvard University)
 * Alan Mycroft (University of Cambridge)
 * Vijay A. Saraswat (IBM Research)
 * Vasco T. Vasconcelos (University of Lisbon)
 * Jan Vitek (Purdue University)
 * Nobuko Yoshida (Imperial College London)