SPAA

This volume consists of papers that were presented at the 27th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2015) held on 13--15 June 2015, in Portland, Oregon, USA, as part of Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC 2015). SPAA 2015 was sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) and organized in cooperation with the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). Financial support was provided by Akamai, Oracle Labs, and Intel Labs.

We received a total of 131 submissions and the program committee selected 31 papers for full presentation. Of these papers, "Speed Scaling in the Non-clairvoyant Model" by Yossi Azar, Nikhil Devanur, Zhiyi Huang, and Debmalya Panigrahi was selected to receive the Best Paper Award. In addition, the PC selected 11 papers to be presented as brief announcements. Finally, this year's program also included two invited talks: "Myths and Misconceptions about Threads" by Hans-J Boehm and "The Revolution in Graph Theoretic Optimization Problems" by Gary Miller.

The mix of selected papers reflects the unique nature of SPAA in bringing together the theory and practice of parallel computing. SPAA defines parallelism broadly to encompass any computational device or scheme that can perform multiple operations or tasks simultaneously or concurrently. The technical papers in this volume are to be considered preliminary versions, and authors are generally expected to publish polished and complete versions in archival scientific journals. The committee's decisions in accepting brief announcements were based on the perceived interest of these contributions, with the goal that they serve as bases for further significant advances in parallel computing. Extended versions of the SPAA brief announcements may be published later in other conferences or journals.

The reviewing process consisted of multiple steps. Each paper received a minimum of 3 reviews in the initial phase. After this phase, the authors were given a chance to reply to the reviews during a 2-day rebuttal period. After all the rebuttals were received, there was extensive online discussion of the papers over a period of a week and additional reviews were solicited for some papers. The final decisions were made during a phone meeting on March 10.