2 April 2010

Call for papers: Resilient Servers and Data Centres

A special issue of International Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems

Widespread deployment of heterogeneous virtualized systems in cloud computing and warehouse-scale data centres, often used for business-critical applications, introduces new challenges and opportunities for technological advances and innovation. This special issue seeks experimental, experiential, and theoretical papers dealing with a variety of questions concerning innovations for resilience in modern IT systems.

This issue will present questions which include but are not limited to:
  • In addition to the more traditional definitions of high availability and fault tolerance, the ability to respond robustly to a wide variety of changes has become extremely important in modern dynamic IT structures; is a new conception of resilience needed?
  • Economics of resilience: How much is enough and what is it worth? Do we have adequate specification of resilience objectives to facilitate a global economic ecosystem in which workload resilience goals can be specified, bid, purchased, and measured?
  • Disasters, DOS attacks, viral outbreaks, thermal issues, power outages, operator strikes, mass upgrades and maintenance actions are significant impairments to resilience; what new impairments to resilience arise in modern scale distributed data centres?
  • How do distributed and cloud computing exacerbate and/or mitigate some of these impairments?
  • How do we achieve economically viable (e.g., cost effective, green, efficient, easy-to-manage) geographical-scale resilience in computing?
  • Complex systems management challenges: How do multiple managers and domains of ownership interact in vast-scale IT systems?
  • What new techniques are needed for modelling, testing, validation of resilient systems and data centres?
  • What design, analysis, validation, problem prediction, and test technologies are applicable and might be transferable from the safety-critical, manufacturing, and industrial domains to the IT domain?
  • How can problem prediction and proactive avoidance be used to improve the resilience of these systems in light of the new classes of hazards that they face?
Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: 1 August, 2010
Author notification: 1 October, 2010

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