METRICS

To fully understand a system is to fully understand its performance in its intended environment. The system can be a logic gate, an algorithm, a computer, an operating system, or a computer network. The scale covered by these systems is huge, extending from switches at nano (molecular) scale to communication systems at astronomical scales. The problems posed in performance evaluation are often extremely difficult, a fact that has strong implications for those who create systems: If a system's performance is hard to evaluate, then the system will be hard to understand; this fact has had less influence on system designers than one might hope for. We risk only slight exaggeration by likening the behavior of 100,000 lines of code to that of an emotional primate, common emotions being obstinacy and crankiness. (Will performance analysis merge with psychoanalysis?So our field of performance measurement, modeling, and evaluation is at the heart of all engineering and applied science. It is strong and vibrant, as it must be, and its practitioners are driven, enthusiastic researchers, educators, and managers; the papers in the proceedings to follow are among their latest contributions to the field's collective wisdom, particularly in the computer and network engineering sciences.The authors of the papers herein are to be congratulated for having met the increasingly stiff standards of the program committees (PCs) of SIGMETRICS and the IFIP Working Group 7.3. On the other side of the coin, the PC members, especially the Program Co-Chairs Zhen Liu and Arif Merchant, deserve our gratitude for their tireless efforts in putting together an outstanding program of presentations; special thanks in the present context go to Yefim Shuf for seeing to the production of these proceedings. The chair takes this opportunity to thank the other members of the organizing committee for their selfless and skillful work on all aspects of conference organization: Vishal Misra (local arrangements - and much more), Li Zhang (tutorials, student support), Sambit Sahu (finance), Jason Nieh (publicity), Philippe Nain (student support), a late addition, and finally our web guys Hanhua Feng and Angelos Stavrou. The chair owes particular thanks to all, as dealing with him (another cranky primate), has not always been easy.