Please accept our apologies for cross-posting. ********************************************************************** Call for Papers: Special Session on "Service Level Agreements" at HPCC-06 In distributed environments, applications often make use of pre-defined resources (and services) defined statically at the start of application execution. However, such resources may either not be appropriate or available every time execution is requested -- therefore requiring the use of a registry service to discover resources dynamically. It is also possible that resources may be owned by institutions/individuals within another administrative domain -- outside the direct control of the application manager. It is therefore necessary to make use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to provide the interface between application users making demands on resources, and resource providers determining what should be made available for external use. An SLA may define: (i) requirements that such an application would place on resources (and services) owned by another third party; (ii) check whether these requirements have been met during use. The complexity of an SLA can vary from a static description of resource names (specified in terms of IP addresses) to complex constraints defined as functions that can be evaluated at deployment time. The aim of this special session is to bring together researchers in high performance computing, networking infrastructure and application sciences to demonstrate how SLAs may be defined, managed, updated and used. The following topics provide some guidance on content appropriate for this special session: * Description techniques for SLAs * Static vs. dynamic SLAs * Validation techniques for SLA parameters * Matchmaking approaches for SLA comparisons * Discovering resources based on SLA descriptions * Comparison of SLA and policy descriptions * Penalty clauses for SLAs + legal issues * Managing user expectations via SLAs * SLA descriptions and Quality of Service * Multi-party SLAs * Aggregating multiple SLAs * SLAs in Virtual Organizations (both multi-party and multiple SLAs) * Negotiating SLAs dynamically * SLA-based co-scheduling and resource reservation * SLAs and Registry Services * SLA-based trust management SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Submissions must include an abstract, five to ten keywords, the e-mail address of the corresponding author and should not exceed ten pages including tables and figures. All paper submissions must already be formatted according to the guidelines for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and represent unpublished and original work. Manuscripts must be submitted in PDF format, usage of LaTeX as a document preparation system is strongly encouraged. Submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register for the conference and present the work. Submissions to HPCC-06 will be conducted electronically on the conference website. IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission: March 13, 2006 Acceptance notification: May 29, 2006 Camera ready version: June 26, 2006 Conference: September 13-15, 2006 PUBLICATION The accepted papers will be published in proceedings of the HPCC-06 conference by Springer's Lecture Note in Computer Science (LNCS). SPECIAL SESSION WEB SITE http://www.cs.vu.nl/~bjo/sla/sla-cfp.html CONFERENCE WEB SITE http://hpcc06.lrr.in.tum.de/ http://www.hpcc-conference.org/2006/ -- Benno Overeinder IIDS Group, Section Computer Systems, voice: (+31) 20 598 7634 Department of Computer Science, Faculty fax: (+31) 20 598 7653 of Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam e-mail: bjo@cs.vu.nl Boelelaan 1081a, NL-1081 HV Amsterdam