Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the 28thACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures. The goal of SPAA is to develop a deeper understanding of parallelism in all its forms, bringing together the theory and practice of parallel computing. This year's program reflects that goal, with a diverse selection of papers at the cutting edge of parallel computing. The program includes 38 regular papers and 14 brief announcements, as well as keynote talks by Michael I. Jordan and Nir Shavit. Traditional topics in parallelism are well represented at SPAA this year. The program includes papers on parallel algorithms for classical questions (e.g., sorting and graph problems, see Sessions 9 and 14). It includes papers on scheduling parallel computations (see Session 3) and scheduling tasks in parallel systems (see Sessions 6 and 8). The program also includes papers on concurrent data structures (see Session 11), and on parallelism in distributed systems (see Session 13). These topics all have a long history at SPAA. Over the last several years, the study of parallelism has expanded to include new models of parallel computation (e.g., Map-Reduce, see Session 1), new architectures (e.g., GPUs, see Session 9), new techniques for managing parallelism (e.g., transactional memory, see Session 4), and new types of parallel systems (e.g., programmable matter, see Session 10). These increasingly important topics are represented at SPAA this year. The best paper award for SPAA 2016 is awarded to a paper focusing on the limitations of certain new models of parallel computation: Shuffles and Circuits (On Lower Bounds for Modern Parallel Computation) by Tim Roughgarden, Sergei Vassilvitskii and Joshua Wang. The authors develop lower bounds on the speed of large-scale parallel computation in a model meant to capture the capabilities of Map-Reduce and Hadoop. They discover an important connection between these computations and polynomials representing boolean functions, and use this fact to show lower bounds for a variety of natural and important problems. We would also like to recognize (in no particular order) three finalists for the best paper award: Randomized approximate nearest neighbor search with limited adaptivity by Mingmou Liu, Xiaoyin Pan and Yitong Yin. Robust and Probabilistic Failure-Aware Placement by Madhukar Korupolu and Rajmohan Rajaraman. Lock-free Transactions without Aborts for Linked Data Structures by Deli Zhang and Damian Dechev These papers highlight the variety of exciting work in parallelism that is represented at SPAA 2016.