Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 35th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2016). This year's symposium continues its tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of research on all aspects of distributed computing, including the theory, design, implementation and applications of distributed algorithms, systems and networks. During the years, PODC has been the stage where many landmark results have been presented that have increased our understanding of this exciting and fundamental research endeavor. In the best tradition of theoretical discovery, the insights that have been provided have not only elucidated fundamental conceptual issues but also found their way into the real world of systems and applications. The call for papers attracted 137 regular submissions and 12 brief announcement submissions. The Program Committee accepted 40 regular papers and 24 brief announcements (some of which come from the regular submissions that could not be accepted due to lack of space) that cover a wide variety of topics. Every submitted paper was read and evaluated by at least three reviewers. The final decisions regarding acceptance or rejection of each paper were made through electronic Program Committee discussions held during April 2016. Revised and expanded versions of a few selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the journal Distributed Computing and in the Journal of the ACM. The Program Committee selected the paper Analysing Snapshot Isolation, by Andrea Cerone and Alexey Gotsman, for this year's Best Paper Award. Moreover, the Program Committee decided to split the Best Student Paper Award between two papers: A Distributed (2+ε)-Approximation for Vertex Cover in O(logΔ/εloglogΔ) Rounds, by Reuven Bar-Yehuda, Keren Censor-Hillel and Gregory Schwartzman, and The Greedy Spanner is Existentially Optimal, by Arnold Filtser and Shay Solomon. Three keynote talks will be given by Andrew A. Chien, Faith Ellen, and Phillip B. Gibbons. The 2016 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing was split between two papers: A Fast and Simple Randomized Parallel Algorithm for the Maximal Independent Set Problem, by Noga Alon, László Babai, and Alon Itai (published in the Journal of Algorithms 1986), and A Simple Parallel Algorithm for the Maximal Independent Set Problem by Michael Luby (published at STOC 1985 and in SIAM Journal on Computing 1986). The Prize will be presented at the conference. Finally, this year we will celebrate the 60th birthday of Faith Ellen.