SIGMETRICS Viability Review

Albert Greenberg

SIGMETRICS Chair

October 2006

Financials

• 2006 fund balance approximately $356K– Up from $323K in 2002– $51K now required vs. $26K in 2002

• Fund raising– Industrial sponsors: SIGMETRICS ’06 –

France Telecom, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMWARE

– SIGMETRICS ’07 (at FCRC) – Google, working on others

Membership• Relatively stable membership

– 2006: >70% one year retention– Current membership about 500

• Decline from 546 in 2002

• Looking to broaden in SIGMETRICS areas of interest – Broader PC covering high performance computing, networking,

databases, fault tolerance, performance analysis, tools, mathematical foundations

– Advertising in wider range of venues (30 user groups, very diverse)– Broaden numbers of papers accepted and areas of papers accepted

• Initiatives under discussion for annual conference– Student “pre-interviews”– Funding centric workshops– Educational tutorials

Conferences and Workshops• 50-100% sponsorship

– WOSP, SelfManage, MAMA, SysML, ICQT, Job Scheduling

• Official home of MAMA -- strong successful workshop with SIGMETRICS for 9 years

– Alternate years our conference is joint with IFIP W.G. 7.3 on Performance

• 10-50% sponsorship– SENSYS

• Recently, large fraction of (analytical or network measurement) networking papers– In SIGMETRICS ’07 we are reaching out to the

computing communities• Highly recognizable names from: Architecture, High

Performance Computing, Databases, CS Theory, Operations Research, …

• PR push – posters, mailing lists

Publications

• SIGMETRICS Newsletter– 4 issues, typically devoted to special topics

• Tools for Computer Architecture Research• E-commerce• Performance and Verification• Large Scale Network Inference• Design Implementation and Performance of Storage Systems• Advances in Scheduling

– One issue every year devoted to MAMA– Proceedings of SIGMETRICS

• SIGMETRICS bulletin board

SIGMETRICS Community Benefits

• Awards sponsored:– Annual Achievement Award– Ken Sevcik Best Paper Award– “Rising Star” award being developed – exceptional

contribution from a member ~ 7 to 10 years post graduation

• Ideas for the future– Industry and academic pre-interviews at conferences– Increased industrial contacts and interactions

Backup

Incentives to Increase Membership

• Discussing incentives to increase membership– Industry interactions and “pre-interviews” for students– Similar for academia– Provides volunteer development opportunities

• Funding-centric workshops to better align researchers and NSF program managers– Increasing NSF funding for SIGMETRICS members– In allied disciplines (e.g., High Performance

Computing), what are the opportunities• A Future Direction: Educational tutorials

– Geared towards industry – e.g., intense performance modeling, optimization classes for industry