Every two years, HPTS brings together a lively and opinionated group of participants to discuss and debate the pressing topics that affect today's systems and their design and implementation, especially where scalability is concerned. The workshop includes position paper presentations, panels, moderated discussions, and significant time for casual interaction. And of course beer.

Since its inception in 1985, HPTS has always been about large scale. Over the years the focus has shifted from scalable transaction processing to very large databases to cloud computing. Today, scalability is about big data. What interesting but out-of-the-spotlight big-data applications are out there? How are datacenter software and hardware abstractions evolving to support big data apps? How has big data changed the role of data stewardship—not just data security, but data provenance and dealing with noisy data? How are big data apps affected by limitations in energy consumption? What advances have occurred in identifying patterns and even approximate schemas at petabyte scale? How have the provisioning of networking, storage and computing in datacenters shifted to support these apps?

We ask potential participants to submit a brief technical summary or position, presenting a viewpoint on a controversial topic, a summary of lessons learned, experience with a large or unusual system, an innovative mechanism, an enormous problem looming on the horizon, or anything else that convinces the program committee that the participant has something interesting to say. The submission process is purposely lightweight, but we require each submission to have only a single author.

The workshop is by invitation only and is limited to under 100 participants. The submissions drive both the invitation process and the workshop agenda. Participants may be asked to be part of a presentation or discussion session at the workshop. Students are particularly encouraged to submit.

What to submit:

A 1 page position statement or extended abstract
Optional: the written submission can include a link to one or both of the following as an expanded part of the submission:
Maximum of 3 PowerPoint-type slides
Maximum 2 minute video presentation —can be of you speaking with or without slides, a video demo or other video illustration of your proposed presentation, etc.
Even if you choose NOT to submit these, the PC may decide to ask you for them later during consideration of submissions.
The length limits will be strictly observed. We won't consider too-long submissions.
How to submit: Go to http://bit.ly/hpts2013submit

When to submit: Now would be good. Official deadlines are:

Submission of Papers: Extended to March 18, 2013

Notification of Acceptance: May 24, 2013

HPTS Workshop: September 22-25, 2013