Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems

 

Special Issue on: "Resilient Servers and Data Centres"

Guest Editors:
Lisa Spainhower, IBM Systems and Technology Group, USA
Rick Harper, IBM Research, USA

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.

Subject Coverage
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?

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. Published articles will be indexed in the major on-line archives (including DBLP).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 1 December, 2010 (extended)

Author notification: 1 February, 2011