Dependability Issues in Emerging Technologies
Call for Participation
SESSION ORGANIZERS
Lucian Prodan, UPT Romania
Mihai Udrescu, UPT Romania
TENTATIVE COMMITTEE
(confirmation pending)
Mircea Vladutiu, UPT Romania
Gianluca Tempesti, EPFL Switzerland
Andrew Tyrrell, University of York, UK
Adrian Stoica, NASA–JPL, USA
Lukas Sekanina, BUT, Czech Republic
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submissions: January 9, 2006
Author notification: January 23, 2006
Final papers due: February 15, 2006
sponsored by ACM SIGMICRO
Computers are, perhaps, the finest exponents of the present days’ technological wave. Though solidly set on the road of evolution, their challenge comes from this being manifold: some applications require speed above anything else, while others require the highest possible dependability. Critical applications, the foremost being catalyzed by the advent of the space exploration era, now represent an entirely new domain that harnesses the salient benefits of computing power and technological advances. Its special requirements therefore encouraged a shifting in priorities from brute computing force (which appears to have reached somewhat sufficient levels today, at least for a range of applications) towards dependable computing; however, it also pointed out that in the context of what is now called classical computation, it seems that one can hardly expect more then marginal improvements performance-wise, even for sophisticated approaches.
Further improving computing performance could be brought by the new, emerging, technologies, such as nanoelectronics, biologically-inspired computing, molecular computing, and quantum computing; however, their promise of superior performance is bound to a range of functional vulnerabilities and sensitivity to perturbations that can only be counterbalanced by dependability-raising measures. These aspects represent the driving forces that fuel the need for different and better-suited designs, therefore justifying a quest for new inspiration in both their hardware and software designs.
Emerging technologies, expected to scale well beyond the physical limits of classical computing, are to be the main beneficiaries of dependability-raising techniques. New fields in computing, such as biologically-inspired and quantum computing, have the potential of paving the way to such techniques. Environmental aggressions are successfully fought by both: nature has endowed all its living creatures with incredible robust features, while quantum computations take place in a natively fault-rich environment.
In order to explore new avenues in building dependable computing systems, we initiate the:
Special Session on
Dependability Issues in Emerging Technologies
Targeted topics will include (without being limited to):
- Hierarchical fault tolerance strategies
- Survivability aspects in evolvable systems
- Fault tolerance in quantum computing
- Impact of dependability-raising techniques on performance computing
- Reliability assessment in emerging technologies
- Dependability requirements and design for dependability for space applications
- Reliability aspects in reconfigurable systems
- Dependability issues in distributed computing and networks of sensors
Paper submissions are due by the CF’06 conference’s deadline of December 16, 2005. Late submissions for this session should be e-mailed as .pdf files directly to Lucian Prodan at lprodan@cs.upt.ro. See the CF’06 website for additional instructions for authors. Accepted papers will be published in the CF’06 proceedings.