Second International Conference on Networks for Grid Applications
Beijing, China, October 8-10, 2008
http://www.gridnets.org/

Sponsored by ICST
Technically co-sponsored by Create-Net, ACM SIGARCH, and EU-IST


All accepted papers will be published by Springer in the ICST Lecture Notes (LNICST) series. The proceedings will be published by Springer and will be available both as paper-based copies and via Springerlink.

The GridNets conference series is an annual international meeting that provides a focused and highly interactive forum where researchers and technologists have the opportunity to present and discuss leading research, developments, and future directions in the Grid networking area. The goal of this event is to serve as both the premier conference presenting best Grid Networking research and a forum where new concepts can be introduced and explored.

Previous events in this series were: GridNets 2004 in San Jose (USA), GridNets 2005 in Boston (USA), GridNets 2006 in San Jose (USA) and GridNets 2007 in Lyon (France). All these events have been successful in attracting high quality papers and a wide international participation. From the first event through the fourth, it was known as the GridNets Workshop affiliated with the IEEE BroadNets conference series. From last year on, it has been offered as an independent conference.

Grid developers and practitioners are increasingly realising the importance of efficient network support. Entire classes of applications would greatly benefit by a network-aware grid middleware, able to effectively manage the network resource in terms of scheduling, access and use. Conversely, the peculiar requirements of grid applications provide stimulating drivers for new challenging research towards the development of grid-aware networks.

Cooperation between grid middleware and network infrastructure driven by a common control plane is a key factor to effectively empower the global grid platform for the execution of network-intensive applications, requiring massive data transfers, very fast and low-latency connections, and stable and guaranteed transmission rates. Large e-science projects, as well as industrial and engineering applications for data analysis, image processing, multimedia, or visualisation just to name a few are awaiting an efficient grid network support. They would be boosted by a global grid platform enabling end-to-end dynamic bandwidth allocation, broadband and low-latency access, interdomain access control, and other network performance monitoring capabilities.

Scope
* Network architectures and technologies for grids;
* Integration of advanced optical networking technologies into the grid environment;
* End to end lightpath provisioning software systems and emergent standards;
* The network as a first class grid resource: network resource information publication, brokering and co-scheduling with other resources;
* Interaction of the network with distributed data management systems;
* Network monitoring, traffic characterisation and performance analysis;
* Inter-layer interactions: optical layer with higher layer protocols, integration among layers;
* Experience with pre-production optical network infrastructures and exchange points;
* Peer-to-peer network enhancements applied to the grid;
* Network support for wireless and ad hoc grids;
* Data replication and multicasting strategies and novel data transport protocols;
* Cluster and high performance networks;
* Networks for Data Centers;
* Networks & Cloud computing issues;
* Fault-tolerance, self healing networks;
* Security and scalability issues when connecting a large number of sites within a virtual organization VPN;
* Simulations;
* New concepts and requirements that may fundamentally reshape the network evolution.

Keynote Speakers
To be defined.

Important Dates
* Workshop Proposal Deadline: 23 June 2008
* Paper Submission Deadline: 23 June 2008
* Paper Acceptance Notification: 15 August 2008
* Final paper submission: 1 September 2008
* Conference: Beijing during October 8-10, 2008
)) For submission, please refer to http://gridnets.org/authkit.html

Organizing Committee

-General co-chairs:
* Chris Edwards (Lancaster University)
* Michael Welzl (University of Innsbruck)
* Junsheng Yu (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications)

-Local co-chairs:
* Yuan'an Liu (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications)
* Tongxu Zhang (China Mobile Group Design Institute Co. Ltd.)
* Shaohua Liu (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications)

-Program Committee co-chairs:
* Pascale Vicat-Blanc Primet (INRIA, ENS-Lyon)
* Joe Mambretti (Northwestern University)
* Tomohiro Kudoh (AIST, Japan)

-Publicity chair:
* Serafim Kotrotsos (EXIS IT) for Europe
* Xingyao Wu (China Mobile Group Design Institute Co. Ltd.) for Asia
* Sumit Naiksatam (Cisco Systems) for USA

-Publications chair:
* Marcelo Pasin (INRIA, ENS-Lyon)

-Exhibits and Sponsorship chair:
* Peng Gao (China Mobile Group Design Institute Co. Ltd.)
* Junsheng Yu (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications)

-Workshop chair:
* Ioannis Tomkos (Athens Information Technology)

-Steering Committee:
* Imrich Chlamtac, Chair, (CREATE-NET)
* Pascale Vicat-Blanc Primet (INRIA, ENS-Lyon)
* Michael Welzl (University of Innsbruck)

-Industry Track chair:
* Tibor Kovacs (ICST)

-Panels chair:
* Chris Edwards (Lancaster University)

-Conference Organization chair:
* Gergely Nagy (ICST)

-Finance chair:
* Karen Decker (ICST)

-Webmaster:
* Yehia El-khatib (Lancaster University)