PPOPP

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to PPoPP'08: The 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming. Since its inception (as PPEALS) in 1988, PPoPP has provided a leading forum for work in all aspects of parallelism and concurrency, including theoretical foundations, programming models, algorithms, applications, and systems software. Never in the past 20 years, however, has the conference been as broadly relevant as it is today: with the move to ubiquitous multicore processors and heterogeneous systems-on-chip now well underway, parallelism has moved onto the critical path of almost every development effort.

This year's call for papers attracted 102 submissions, a dramatic increase from last year's 65. Every paper was read by at least three members of the program committee; additional, outside reviews were solicited in special cases. At an in-person meeting of the program committee in October 2007, 25 papers were selected for presentation at the conference, on topics ranging from the theoretical (formal models, static analysis) to the highly applied (algorithms for special-purpose platforms). Transactional memory was the single most popular topic: the large number of acceptances in this area reflects an even larger number of very high quality submissions. Authors of high quality papers that could not be accepted for the conference proper were invited to present their work as posters. 13 of them accepted this invitation; 4 others were chosen from among 7 papers submitted explicitly as posters.

Given the significance of parallel hardware trends, the steering committee chose this year to co-locate with the International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture. We are delighted to share with HPCA'08 not only the conference venue, but a much-anticipated keynote by IBM Fellow Emerita Frances Allen, parallel compiler pioneer and recipient of the 2007 ACM Turing Award. The PPoPP program also includes a panel on highly parallel programming models, moderated by John Mellor-Crummey, last year's Program Chair. Continuing a tradition begun on John's watch, the conference will be followed by a day of workshops and tutorials, among them the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Transactional Computing (TRANSACT 2008).