We are pleased to have hosted the 35th edition of the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2021).
This is the second year that we are unable to meet up in person, but we have had a chance to improve our virtual meeting skills, so we hope we provided an online meeting experience that gave good value to attendees and helped showcase the invited speakers and the contributed papers that make up the program for this year.
We had looked forward to holding the conference in Portland, Oregon, but what a difference a year makes. We have all had varying experiences in meeting the challenges of the pandemic year, personally and professionally, but our international community has coalesced to carry on the networking and collaboration required to organize a conference of this caliber.
We believe that the heart and soul of the conference is as vibrant as ever and that the same level of rigor and the usual high standards of previous years have been supported to create the technical content of the main conference and eighteen workshops. While the program committee conducted their work for the main conference, and the workshops solicited submissions and invited speakers, the organizers explored the options for presenting the conference virtually. In parallel, the Computer Society Conference Services staff were building their toolkit for supporting the virtual conference format. Further, most of the conference community were also learning how to conduct their research and educational programs in virtual and online and remote modes.
About the scientific process:
We received a total of 558 preliminary abstracts and 462 complete technical paper submissions this year. All submissions went through a thorough review process, and each paper received at least three reviews from members of the Program Committee and select external reviewers. We held the Program Committee Meeting in December completely virtually via zoom. A small subset of papers underwent shepherding and a second PC review. This rigorous process has resulted in the 105 high quality papers you find here. That represents an acceptance rate of 22.7%.
The best paper: “xBGAS: A Global Address Space Extension on RISC-V for High Performance Computing”, by Wang, Leidel, Williams, Ehret, Mark, Kinsy, and Chen was selected by a small PC subcommittee based in part on the presentation and Q&A out of the four nominees.
We really appreciated the flexibility and commitment of all people that contributed to the quality of our conference and their willingness to adapt to the new normal of a virtual conference. Much of what needed doing happened without our intervention, and we had a smooth ride in supporting their work over a changing landscape. Thank you.
Aparna Chandramowlishwaran and David Bader, General co-chairs of IPDPS’21