[e2e] Call for Papers for the 2nd Intelligent Storage Workshop

[Joe Touch]

(Note: we asked Micah to include his note explaining the relevance of 
this workshop to this list in the CFP post, as context for list 
subscribers - BB/JDT)

Attached  is a Call for Papers for the 2nd Intelligent Storage Workshop,
which will be held May 20-21, 2004 at the University of Minnesota's 
Digital Technology Center. Because this workshop is not in the 
networking area, I will explain why I feel it is relevant to the 
end-to-end list:

One way of understanding the End-to-End Principle is as a description of 
an inherent tradeoff in the design of any  service that is implemented 
using a shared infrastructure.  The tradeoff is between the service's 
"deployment scalability" on that infrastructure (meaning, roughly, how 
universal the deployment can become) and its specialization to a 
particular class of applications.  Viewed in this general way, 
end-to-end is not specific to networking, and applies equally well to 
other services that can be implemented using a shared infrastructure, 
including storage.

Putting "intelligence" into any infrastructure is appealing, but is also
problematic.  It holds out the promise of allowing the architecture to 
take advantage of operations that can be implemented at a very low level 
and close to the physical medium, be it trasmission or storage.  Issues 
arise having to do with layering: how do we add such intelligence to the
infrastructure without specializing it and thus limiting the scalability 
of its deployment?

The subject of the 2nd Intelligent Storage Workshop is adding 
intelligence to the storage medium.  This is analogous to adding 
intelligence to the link layer of the network, if we think of the 
storage medium as being a transmission medium "turned sideways in time" 
(to paraphrase Dan Hillis).

To quote from the CFP:

<begin quote>
This workshop is devoted to exploring effective ways to construct shared
storage systems with significant embedded intelligence that will 
effectively accommodate emerging storage-intensive applications in 
business, science, engineering, and medicine.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together several communities to
brainstorm about the nature of intelligent storage and its potential. 
What kind of intelligence can storage devices support? What is the 
architecture of future intelligent storage systems? What are the 
applications that can benefit from such intelligent storage systems? How 
does one communicate with an intelligent storage device? These and other 
key research issues and challenges will be identified.
<end quote>

My point is that these are issues that members of the end-to-end 
community has thought about, and I hope that some might be willing to 
particpate in this workshop lend your experience and insights to the 
storage community.

Micah Beck
Associate Professor, Computer Science
University of Tennessee

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Call for Papers
Second Intelligent Storage Workshop
May 20-21, 2004
University of Minnesota
Digital Technology Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Http://www.dtc.umn.edu

Sponsored by
IEEE Mass Storage Systems Technical Committee (pending)
University of Minnesota Digital Technology Center Intelligent Storage
Consortium(DISC)
SNIA Object-based Storage Technical Working Group

Submission Due : February 28, 2004
Notification of Acceptance: March 31, 2004
Camera-ready copy due: April 20, 2004

What this workshop is about?
Following Moore's Law, disk storage capacity has been doubling every 18
months in the last 20 years. However, the demand for data storage has 
also increased dramatically driven by the use of the Internet as a 
fundamental tool within business, science, and engineering endeavors. 
How to explore and access information over the Internet becomes a 
challenge. This workshop is devoted to exploring effective ways of using 
on-board intelligence to construct shared storage systems that can 
effectively accommodate emerging storage-intensive applications in 
business, science, engineering, and medicine.

What is the goal of this workshop?
The goal of the workshop is to bring together several communities to
brainstorm about the nature of intelligent storage and it's potential. 
What kind of intelligence can storage devices support? What is the 
architecture of future intelligent storage systems? What are the 
applications that can benefit from such intelligent storage systems? The 
key research issues and challenges will be identified.

Paper submission
Authors are requested to submit five page position papers in any area of
intelligent storage including storage technologies, system 
infrastructure, and storage-intensive applications. Possible topics 
include intelligent P2P/Grid storage models and applications, security, 
information discovery, replication, mirroring, multimedia applications, 
bioinformatics, and others.

Program Committee: TBD
Organizing Committee Members:
Program Co-Chairs: David Du and Jon Weissman, DTC and Department of CSE
Publicity Chair: Tom Ruwart, Digital Technology Center

Jon B. Weissman
Associate Professor                     phone:  (612) 626-0044
Department of Computer Science             FAX: (612) 625-0572
and Engineering                         office: 6-189 EE/ CSci
University of Minnesota                       : 425 Walter/DTC
200 Union St. S.E.                       email: jon at cs.umn.edu
Minneapolis, MN 55455                 URL: www.cs.umn.edu/~jon