PMLDC 2016 - 2016 Workshop on Programming Models and Languages for Distributed Computing

Whether you are programming a rich web application in JavaScript that mutates state in the client’s browser, or you are building a massively deployed mobile application that will operate with client state at the device, it’s undeniable that you are building a distributed system!
Two major challenges of programming distributed systems are concurrency and partial failure. Concurrency of operations can introduce accidental nondeterminism: computations may result in different outcomes with the same inputs given scheduling differences in the underlying system unless a synchronization mechanism is used to enforce some order. Synchronization is typically expensive, and reduces the efficiency of user applications. Partial failure, or the failure of one or more components in a distributed system at one time, introduces the challenge of knowing, when an operation fails, which components of the operation completed successfully. To solve these problems in practice on an unreliable, asynchronous network, atomic commit protocols and timeouts as failure detection are typically used.
Because of these challenges, early approaches to providing programming abstractions for distributed computing that ignored them were inherently misguided: the canonical example being the Remote Procedure Call, still widely deployed in industry.
The goal of this workshop is to discuss new approaches to distributed programming that provide efficient execution and the elimination of accidental nondeterminism resulting from concurrency and partial failure. It will bring together both practitioners and theoreticians from many disciplines: database theory, distributed systems, systems programming, programming languages, data-centric programming, web application development, and verification, to discuss the state-of-the-art of distributed programming, advancement of the state-of-the-art and paths forward to better application of theory in practice.
The main objectives of this workshop are the following:
To review the state-of-the-art research in languages, models, and systems for distributed programming;
To identify areas of critical need where research can advance the state of the art;
To create a forum for discussion;
To present open problems from practitioners with an aim towards motivating academic research on relevant problems faced by industry.
In the spirit of both ECOOP and Curry On, this workshop aims at favoring a multidisciplinary perspective by bringing together researchers, developers, and practitioners from both academia and industry.