PPOPP

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 16th ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming -- PPoPP'11. PPoPP continues to be the premiere forum where researchers present their work on all aspects of parallelism and concurrency: algorithms and applications, programming models, languages, and environments, system software and runtime systems, and theoretical foundational work. As our industry continues to move toward parallel systems, from large-scale supercomputers to multicore mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, research work on concurrency is needed to support developers at all levels of the execution stack.

This year we received 165 completed submissions, close to the conference record high. Because of the large number of submissions, in addition to the 25 program committee members, we formed an external review committee and invited 30 experts in various areas to help out in reviewing papers. In addition, committee members also invited external reviewers, to provide our submitting authors with a total of more than 630 reviews. There was a paper bidding process to match up the expertise of the reviewers and the reviewed papers before papers were assigned to reviewers. An on-line discussion period was conducted among all reviewers of each paper to smooth out the differences among the reviewers before the program committee meeting was held. For the final program, the program committee selected 26 full papers and 13 posters for the program. They span a wide spectrum of areas in parallel programming.

A few years back, the PPoPP Steering Committee recognized the importance of broadening the conference experience through interaction with hardware architects designing parallel systems. This year we continue the collocation with the International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture. Beside encouraging cross-participation in any of the two conference sessions, PPoPP and HPCA will share two keynotes from leading researchers in the area of parallel programming: Jim Larus (Microsoft Research) and Kathryn McKinley (UT Austin), and all the tutorials and workshops.