SPECTS 2008

SPECTS 2008 General Chair's Message

Warm welcome from all the organizers of the 2008 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, SPECTS'2008. This year conference marks the 11th anniversary of SPECTS, which has become a leading international conference on performance evaluation of computer and telecommunication systems. We are thrilled to see the impressive progress of this conference which has gained excellent international reputation.

This year we are moving from North America to Europe as SPECTS and SummerSim in general are real international conference and it is important that they move all around the world. This year's conference will be held in Edinburgh, United Kingdom and SummerSim 2008 and SPECTS 2008 are co-locating for the first time with SISO European Workshop. This is supposed to cut on the expenses and will provide conference participants more sessions and options as they can attend any session in SummerSim 2008 and 2008 SISO European Workshop without paying extra fee.

SPECTS 2008 offers an exceptional forum for worldwide researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, business, and government to share their expertise results and research findings in all areas of performance evaluation of computer, telecommunications and wireless systems including modeling, simulation and measurement/testing of such systems.

This year's SPECTS includes a superb technical program, distinguished keynote speakers, and insightful tutorials. We have chosen the University of Edinburgh campus as a site for our conference. This is the first time we hold this conference and SummerSim on a University campus and we hope it will help cut the expenses and provide a stimulating environment. The site is very close to the center of the city of Edinburgh which makes it easy for participants and their companions to look around and enjoy the many attractions in the area.

The theme of this year's conference, "Performance evaluation is science, engineering and art," reflects the important not only of science and engineering in developing methodologies, models and benchmarks; it emphasizes also the role of art in this process. Designing simulation programs, and benchmarks suites, and presenting input and output data, designing testing, verification and validation schemes, and deriving mathematical expression for performance evaluation metrics require science, engineering and art concepts, approaches and foundations.

SPECTS 2008's technical program consists of several parallel tracks every day, except on Monday, and it will last for three days. Due to space constraints we have one and a third track on Monday. Each track consists of several sessions of top quality papers. The topics covered in the program include: methods and tools, measurement and evaluation techniques, modeling and simulation methodologies and case studies, safe and reliable real time systems, distributed systems, channel models, protocols and mobility in wireless communications and networks, high speed networks, mobile and ad hoc networks, security and reliability, wireless LANs, Quality of Service (QoS), Internet computing, web server performance, high performance computing/computers, switching and routing, parallel systems, optical networks, Internet protocols, local and edge networks, computer architecture, resource managements, among others. We received this year a large number of papers and we accepted only very high quality papers.

Many individuals have contributed to the success of this high caliber international conference. My sincere appreciation goes to all authors including those whose papers were not included in the program. Many thanks to our distinguished keynote speakers for their valuable contribution to the conference. Special thanks to the program chairs, Professors Jose Marzo, and Helena Szczerbicka, for their outstanding work on the technical program. Thanks also are due to the Program Vice Chairs Professors Jose Luis Sevillano and Pawel Gburzynski. Thanks also to the tutorial chair, Prof. S. Dharmaraja, for his efforts on the tutorials. Thanks to Prof. Franco Davoli for serving as the awards chair and for his continuous support of SPECTS over the years. Special thanks go to Mr. Antonio Bueno and Mr. Mike Chinni, for helping as Webmasters. Thanks to the Publication Chair, Dr. Pere Vilà for his good and timely work. Many thanks are due to the publicity committee members, especially the publicity committee chair, Dr. Essia Elhafsi, for her great efforts at publicizing the conference. Thanks to the program committee members and their reviewers for providing timely reviews. Many thanks to the session chairs for their efforts. Thanks are also due to DJ Weed, SCS new Executive Director, for her fine support.

Finally, on behalf of the Executive and Steering Committees of the 2008 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems, SPECTS 2008, and the Society for Modeling and Simulation International, SCS, I invite all of you to be with us in Edinburgh, UK, at SPECTS 2008.

Mohammad S. Obaidat
General Chair, SPECTS 2008