Break-out Sessions

International CANOE Summer School on Events, Publish/Subscribe & Systems, Oslo, 2009

Break-out Sessions

Organizer: Hans-Arno Jacobsen

August 16th – 21st, 2009

Open Collaborate Wiki athttp://www.debs.msrg.utoronto.ca/collaborate

Based on a similar event at DEBS’07 in Toronto.

Organization

• Meet in small groups during three slots throughout the week

• Adjourn in plenum on Friday to present discussion and results

• Each group is given some guiding questions, but may define their own

• Groups should be self-organizing, i.e., designate a scribe and a presenter



Loose Definition & Scope

• All references to “systems” in the sequel are meant to refer to (non-exclusively):– Publish/Subscribe systems (pub/sub)

– Event Processing systems (EP)

– Event Stream Processing systems

– Rule-based systems

– Distributed Event-based systems

• We are primarily argeting the scope of Events, Publish/Subscribe and Systems


Objectives

• Engage and actively participate

• Network and make new friends

• Create awareness for relevant research problems

• Collectively brainstorm on possible

• Work towards a research agenda and road map

• Build on foundations for these discussions

Outcome

• The ideal outcome would be– One coherent deck of slides per group that

we post on the summer school web

– The tracking of group discussions in the Collaborate Wiki

– A common public report for the broader community



Suggested Discussion Groups

• Simulation & evaluation• Applications• Research agenda & road map

• Marketing & advocacy

• Practical limitations

• Collaborations• Interoperability• Management issues

• Others?


Simulation & Evaluation

How can experiments be more systematic and comparable?

• Where can we obtain realistic workloads and data sets?• What benchmarks exist today and should exist in the

future?• How have other communities developed and adopted

benchmarks and data sets?

• What are realistic models for workload generation?• What are good performance metrics? • What is a solid evaluation methodology?


Applications

What are the compelling applications, and how can we promote event-based application

development?

• How can we bring up a world-wide pub/sub network or event processing system?

• What applications would drive the use, participation, and adoption of such a system?

• Can we run a generic event processing system playground across dedicated nodes?

• Who would/should the users be?– Pub/Sub researchers, other researchers, application

developers, end-users?


Applications cont.’d

• What are killer applications for distributed event-based systems? – How can event-based systems help build global

sensor networks? – How can small-scale actuator/sensor networks (e.g.,

in an e-home scenario) profit from pub/sub?

• What apps are the low hanging fruit for adoption?– What applications today are naturally modeled with

events, are easy to implement, are widely used, would benefit from events & pub/sub and EP?


Research Agenda & Road Map

What are the interesting and relevant problems & questions in event

processing research?• What are exciting research challenges that the

community should look at? • What research questions have been neglected in the

past? • Unification

– What important synergies with other areas need to be explored and developed?

• One-size-fits-all – Federation, integration, and interoperation of systems designed for

constrained environments (e.g. sensor networks) with systems designed without these constraints


Marketing & Advocacy

How can we better sell the event-based paradigm?

• What are the key selling points of pub/sub and EP?– Decoupling, push based, asynchronous communication?

• What are the “competing” paradigms?– Tuple spaces, (active) relational databases, streams, CQs?

• What are the difficulties in getting pub/sub & EP accepted? – Unfamiliarity with model– No killer app– Databases (pull model) can do everything– No consistent terminology– Why aren’t tuplespaces, active databases popular, or are they?


Practical Limitations

What are the limitations of pub/sub and EP when it comes to implementing real

applications?• Lack of precise semantics

– Security– Fault-tolerance– Transactions (what does this mean in this context)

• Lack of an established “query” language & model• Overhead

– Due to decoupling– Due to statelessness

• Hard to program/debug• No persistent data (integration with databases)


Collaborations

How can our community collaborate better within and outside itself?

• What are the pre-requisites for successful collaborations?

• At what level and scale can collaborations be carried forward– Benchmarks, applications, systems?

• How can joint, collaborative research efforts be boot-strapped and lead?

• What sources of joint funding exist?


Collaborations cont.’d

• How can we expand the community to include researchers from related fields? – How do we relate to efforts in

• Databases, streams and continuous query processing

• Event processing & complex event processing• ECA rules and active databases

– How do we want to position ourselves as a community?


Management Issues

How can we manage systems scalably?

• How can we deploy, configure and manage systems scalabely?• How do we ensure that the end-to-end QoS issues are met?

– What about multidimensional QoS issues (e.g., real-time + fault tolerance + security)?

– How can we manage QoS in heterogeneous environments?• What are common manageable units and options in systems?

– Can a common standardized system be specialized (i.e., customized, optimized) by tools and made suitable for different use cases

• Are there common management patterns across different systems? – Can we build management tools for systems that operate in a

heterogeneous environment and still adhere to QoS?• Are there use cases for reconfiguration and redeployment in

systems?


Interoperability & Standards

How should standardization efforts proceed?

• What parts of the system should be subjected to standardization?– Data formats, APIs, programming models?

• What should not be standardized?– What concepts are most in flux, application dependent, etc.

• What standards exist today in this space?• What are their limitations?• What standards should exist?


Discussion in Break-out Sessions

• Strike break-out sessions and members

• Tasks for break-out sessions– Designate one or preferably more scribes– Discuss by roughly aiming to answer the

questions asked– Prepare a 10 minute summary on results of

discussion– Add final feedback to Wiki (scribes !!)


Break-out Session Rooms

• To be determined

Documents

Break-out Sessions