PODC

The ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) is one of the premier international conferences on algorithms for distributed computation, including the theory, design, analysis, implementation, and application of such algorithms to domains stretching from traditional long-haul networks to mobile and sensor networks. PODC is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on theoretical computer science, SIGACT, and the ACM Special Interest Group operating systems, SIGOPS.

This volume contains the papers presented at PODC 2017, the 36th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, held on July 25-27, 2017 in Washington, DC. The volume also includes the citations for two awards jointly sponsored by PODC and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC): the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, and the Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award.

The 2017 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing will be presented at DISC 2017 in Vienna, Austria, to Elizabeth Borowsky and Eli Gafni for their paper "Generalized FLP Impossibility Result for t-resilient Asynchronous Computations" published in the Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in 1993.

The 2017 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award is presented to Mohsen Ghaffari, for his dissertation "Improved Distributed Algorithms for Fundamental Graph Problems," written under the supervision of Nancy Lynch at MIT.

There were 154 papers submitted to the symposium, and in addition there were 14 brief announcement submissions. The Program Committee selected 38 contributions, or less than 25% of the 154 submissions, for regular presentations at the symposium. Each presentation is accompanied by a ten-page paper in this volume. The Program Committee also selected 21 papers for presentation as brief announcements (some of which came from the regular paper submissions that could not be accepted due to paucity of space). Each brief announcement is accompanied by a three-page paper in this volume. These announcements present ongoing work or recent results, and it is expected that these results will appear as full papers in other conference proceedings or journals. Every submitted paper was read and evaluated by at least three members of the Program Committee. The committee was assisted by more than 140 external reviewers. The Program Committee made its final decisions during the April 24-25, 2017 meeting hosted by Nancy Lynch at MIT. Revised and expanded versions of several selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the journal Distributed Computing and in the Journal of ACM.

The program included three keynote lectures by Guy Blelloch (CMU, USA), Maurice Herlihy (Brown University, USA), and Rosario Gennaro (CUNY, USA).

The Best Paper Award was presented to Michael Elkin for the paper "A Simple Deterministic Distributed MST Algorithm, with Near-Optimal Time and Message Complexities." The Best Student Paper Award was presented to Peter Davies for the paper "Exploiting Spontaneous Transmissions for Broadcasting and Leader Election in Radio," coauthored with Artur Czumaj.

This year PODC was co-located with 2017 ACM SPAA (Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures). There were also two workshops co-located with PODC: the 4th Workshop on Adaptive Resource Management and Scheduling for Cloud Computing, and the 5th Workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms. The broader program also included two tutorials: Recent Advances in R/W Computability with Speculations by Eli Gafni, and High-Level Specification of Distributed Algorithms by Y. Annie Liu, Scott D. Stoller, and Bo Lin.