Special Issue: Euro-Par 2009

This special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience contains the revised and extended versions of selected papers presented at the Euro-Par 2009 conference. Euro-Par—the European Conference on Parallel Computing—is an annual series of international conferences dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects of parallel and distributed computing. The major themes can be divided into the broad categories of hardware, software, algorithms and applications of parallel and distributed computing. Euro-Par 2009, the 15th conference in the Euro-Par series, was organized in Delft, the Netherlands, by the Parallel and Distributed Systems Group of Delft University of Technology. Fourteen broad topics were defined and advertised, covering a large variety of aspects of parallel and distributed computing. The call for papers attracted a total of 256 submissions. The submitted papers were reviewed at least three and, in many cases, four times. A total of 85 papers were finally accepted for publication. This makes a global acceptance rate of 33%. The authors of accepted papers come from 20 countries, with the four main contributing countries—France, the U.S.A., Spain and Germany—accounting for more than 65%. Based on the results of the reviews and a majority opinion of the topic programme committees, several papers were recommended for a special journal issue. The authors were contacted at the conference and invited to submit revised and extended versions of their papers. These new versions were reviewed independently by three reviewers; two had also reviewed the conference version, the third had not. Eventually, six papers were accepted for publication. This year, the best papers address issues on modern platforms such as Cloud, multicores and high-performance networks—their efficiency as well as their usability. Topic 3 on Scheduling and Load Balancing is represented by the paper Energy-aware scheduling of bag-of-tasks applications on master-worker platforms, authored by Jean-François Pineau, Yves Robert and Frédéric Vivien from France. The authors introduce a model in which the throughput of an application in a master–worker scenario can be maximized while the energy consumption is being minimized. The model includes realistic elements such as overheads and memory constraints. Topic 6 on Grid, Cluster, and Cloud Computing is represented by the paper POGGI: Generating puzzle instances for online games on Grid infrastructures, authored by Alexandru Iosup from the Netherlands. The author investigates the problem of automated, player-customized game content generation in massively multiplayer online games with a focus on puzzle games. His architecture, POGGI, supports the large-scale generation of puzzle instances that match the solving ability of the players and that lead to a fresh game experience. Topic 10 on Parallel Numerical Algorithms is represented by the paper Wavelet-adaptive solvers on multi-core architectures for the simulation of complex systems, authored by Diego Rossinelli, Babak Hejazialhosseini, Michael Bergdorf and Petros Koumoutsakos from Switzerland. Although wavelet-based adaptive simulations are considered inherently sequential, the authors succeed in exposing parallelism that can be exploited by a multicore platform. They demonstrate promising performance gains on upto 16 cores. Topic 11 on Multicore and Manycore Programming is represented by the paper StarPU: A unified platform for task scheduling on heterogeneous multicore architectures, authored by Cédric