ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on 
Optimization of Middleware and Distributed Systems (OM 2001)

To be held in Snowbird, Utah, June 18, 2001
In conjunction with PLDI'01
(In parallel with PPoPP'01)

Keynote Speech: Daniel Yellin, Director of Software Technology, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Invited Talk: Mark Wegman, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Invited Talk: Jim Larus, Microsoft Research

Internet is changing the way software is written, deployed, executed, debugged, and optimized.  To support heterogeneous platforms ranging from mobile devices to active networks, monolithic programs are being replaced with a collection of communicating software components: clients, databases, proxies, and various servers.  This new software architecture provides scalability and flexibility, but its distributed nature complicates most stages of software development.  To save development costs, e-business companies build their applications from reusable middleware components.  While new middleware technologies simplify the task of building the distributed application, they do not address the problem of optimizing its performance.  

The focus of OM'01 is performance optimization of middleware.  The term middleware is intended to extend far beyond the current industrial technologies for e-commerce applications.  Roughly, it is meant to include all systems software that provides enabling services needed by a distributed application, for example:

• connectivity software that allows multiple processes interact across a network,
• Java virtual machines that execute the communicating software components, and
• operating systems and run-time libraries that schedule parallel execution threads.

The workshop will explore the question of what is the right set of techniques to optimize distributed applications and what can programming and compilation technology contribute to this goal.  The workshop will bring together researchers in programming languages, distributed systems, security, and computer architecture.  We hope that OM 2001 will be the first of a series of workshops that will seed collaboration across these fields, as well as expand the research in programming languages onto new and practically relevant problems.

We are looking for corporate support!  In order to increase student participation at the workshop, we are soliciting corporate support, to be used for student travel grants.  If you are considering making a donation, please contact Vugranam C. Sreedhar, (914) 784-7325.