PFARM 2011 - PFARM: The 3rd Workshop on Proactive Failure Avoidance, Recovery, and Maintenance

Over the last decade, research on dependable computing has undergone a shift from reactive towards proactive methods: In classical fault tolerance a system reacts to errors or component failures in order to prevent them from turning into system failures, and maintenance follows fixed, time-based plans. However, due to an ever increasing system complexity, use of commercial-off-the-shelf components, virtualization, ongoing system patches and updates and dynamicity such approaches have become difficult to apply. Therefore, a new area in dependability research has emerged focusing on proactive approaches that start acting before a problem arises in order to increase time-to-failure and/or reduce time-to-repair. These techniques frequently build on the anticipation of upcoming problems based on runtime monitoring. Industry and academia use several terms for such techniques, each focusing on different aspects, including self-* computing, autonomic computing, proactive fault management, trustworthy computing, software rejuvenation, or preventive/proactive maintenance. It is the goal of this workshop to increase collaboration among researchers from various communities all over the world working on the topic of PFARM. We want to provide a stimulating, and fruitful forum to foster collaboration among researchers working on similar topics, to discuss ideas, exchange experiences and to find new answers to the overall challenge of improving system dependability in contemporary computing and communication systems by an order of magnitude or more.
We are interested in submissions from both industry and academia. Topics include, but are not limited to:

Runtime dependability assessment and evaluation (reliability, availability, etc.)
Runtime monitoring for online fault detection and diagnosis, including monitoring data processing
Prediction methods to anticipate failures, resource exhaustion or other critical situations in complex systems, distributed systems, adaptive or peer-to-peer networks.
Predictive diagnosis and fault location as well as root-cause analysis
Online recovery, updates and upgrades, non-intrusive hardware installation and software deployment
Proactive maintenance strategies (short-term as well as long-term)
Optimal decision algorithms and policies to manage and schedule the application of actions
Downtime minimization or avoidance mechanisms such as preventive failover, state-clean up, proactive reconfiguration, failure-prevention driven load balancing, prediction-driven restarts, rejuvenation, adaptive checkpointing, or other prediction-driven enhancements of traditional repair methods
Proactive fault management and maintenance techniques such as monitoring-based replacement, configuration and management of computer systems and components
Dependability evaluation including models to assess the impact on metrics such as availability, reliability, security, performability, survivability and user-oriented metrics such as service availability, downtime, quality-of-service and quality-of-experience.
Case-studies, applications, experiments, experience reports
SUBMISSION

Authors are invited to submit high quality unpublished research work that should not exceed six pages (including all text, references, appendices, and figures) conforming to the IEEE Conference style. Papers must be written in English and should start with the title, authors' names and contact information, and abstract. Submissions must be made in PDF format using the electronic submission system.

Submitted papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee. Accepted papers will be published in the supplement volume of the DSN 2010 proceedings. Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register and present the paper, if accepted.
IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: March 15, 2011
Author notification: April 15, 2011
Camera ready version: May 1, 2011
Workshop: June 27, 2011
FURTHER INFORMATION

Workshop location and registration: DSN 2011 web page
For any further information or question, please contact pfarm2011-AT-informatik.hu-berlin.de