SCOPE CHANGE REQUEST FORM

PERIODICAL TITLE:

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS, for short)

PERIODICAL FINANCIAL CO-SPONSORS:
List all financial co-sponsors (IEEE and non-IEEE) here.

IEEE Computer Society.

[President and Vice-President of Publications have been informed of and approved of the proposed scope change. ]

PERIODICAL TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS:
List all technical co-sponsors (IEEE and non-IEEE) here.

n/a

PERIODICAL CURRENT OFFICIAL SCOPE (include date scope was approved):

“IEEE TAB’s records show that the scope was first approved in 1989” (this statement was taken from the final version of TAB’s periodical review of TPDS in 2011). The last scope change request was approved in June 2012.

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) is published monthly. It publishes a range of papers, comments on previously published papers, and survey articles that deal with the parallel and distributed systems research areas of current importance to our readers. Particular areas of interest in parallel systems include, but are not limited to: a) architectures: design, analysis, implementation, fault resilience and performance measurements of multiple-processor systems; multicore processors, heterogeneous many-core systems; networks on chips, clusters, networks and interprocessor communications; accelerator architectures b) software: parallel languages and compilers; scheduling and task partitioning; operating systems, and programming environments for multiple-processor systems; c) algorithms and applications: models of computation; analysis and design of parallel algorithms; experimental results on multiprocessors, and homogeneous/heterogeneous clusters. Particular areas of interest in distributed systems include, but are not limited to: a) models of computation, algorithms and theory for building distributed system infrastructure and for running distributed applications; b) systems and middleware design for scalable distributed systems; resource sharing and allocation; fault resilience; security and privacy issues; c) Internet computing and distributed applications: such as grid systems, autonomic computing, green computing, web services, distributed event processing, information centric networking, online social networks (distributed algorithms and operation, real and virtual interconnection structures, security), cloud computing (infrastructure, performance, programming, security), data centers, and data management in the Internet; d) emerging applications and networking technologies for distributed systems such as wireless (including ad hoc, delay-tolerant, vehicular and sensor) networks, mobile software systems, and cyber-physical systems.

PERIODICAL REQUESTED NEW SCOPE (include marked up version of current scope, then include new scope as requested):

1). Current scope with changes noted

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) is published monthly. It publishes a range of papers, comments on previously published papers, and survey articles that deal with the parallel and distributed systems research areas of current importance to our readers.

Particular areas of interest in parallel systems include, but are not limited to:

a) Parallel and distributed algorithms, focusing on topics such as: models of computation; numerical, combinatorial, and data-intensive parallel algorithms, scalability of algorithms and data structures for parallel and distributed systems, communication and synchronization protocols, network algorithms, scheduling, and load balancing.

b) Applications of parallel and distributed computing, including computational and data-enabled science and engineering, big data applications, parallel crowd sourcing, large-scale social network analysis, management of big data, cloud and grid computing, scientific and biomedical applications, mobile computing, and cyber-physical systems.

c) Parallel and distributed architectures:, including architectures for instruction-level and thread-level parallelism; design, analysis, implementation, fault resilience and performance measurements of multiple-processor systems; multicore processors, heterogeneous many-core systems; networks on chips, clusters, networks and interprocessor communications; accelerator architectures b) software: parallel languages and compilers; scheduling and task partitioning; operating systems, and programming environments for multiple-processor systems; c) algorithms and applications: models of computation; analysis and design of parallel algorithms; experimental results on multiprocessors, and homogeneous/heterogeneous clusters. Particular areas of interest in distributed systems include, but are not limited to: a) models of computation, algorithms and theory for building distributed system infrastructure and for running distributed applications; b) systems and middleware design for scalable distributed systems; resource sharing and allocation; fault resilience; security and privacy issues; c) Internet computing and distributed applications: such as grid systems, autonomic computing, green computing, web services, distributed event processing, information centric networking, online social networks (distributed algorithms and operation, real and virtual interconnection structures, security), cloud computing (infrastructure, performance, programming, security), data centers, and data management in the Internet; d) emerging applications and networking technologies for distributed systems such as wireless (including ad hoc, delay-tolerant, vehicular and sensor) networks, mobile software systems, and cyber-physical systems.petascale and exascale systems designs; novel big data architectures; special purpose architectures, including graphics processors, signal processors, network processors, media accelerators, and other special purpose processors and accelerators; impact of technology on architecture; network and interconnect architectures; parallel I/O and storage systems; architecture of the memory hierarchy; power-efficient and green computing architectures; dependable architectures; and performance modeling and evaluation.

d) Parallel and distributed software, including parallel and multicore programming languages and compilers, runtime systems, operating systems, Internet computing and web services, resource management including green computing, middleware for grids, clouds, and data centers, libraries, performance modeling and evaluation, parallel programming paradigms, and programming environments and tools.

2). Requested new scope

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) is published monthly. It publishes a range of papers, comments on previously published papers, and survey articles that deal with the parallel and distributed systems research areas of current importance to our readers.

Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

a) Parallel and distributed algorithms, focusing on topics such as: models of computation; numerical, combinatorial, and data-intensive parallel algorithms, scalability of algorithms and data structures for parallel and distributed systems, communication and synchronization protocols, network algorithms, scheduling, and load balancing.

b) Applications of parallel and distributed computing, including computational and data-enabled science and engineering, big data applications, parallel crowd sourcing, large-scale social network analysis, management of big data, cloud and grid computing, scientific and biomedical applications, mobile computing, and cyber-physical systems.

c) Parallel and distributed architectures, including architectures for instruction-level and thread-level parallelism; design, analysis, implementation, fault resilience and performance measurements of multiple-processor systems; multicore processors, heterogeneous many-core systems; petascale and exascale systems designs; novel big data architectures; special purpose architectures, including graphics processors, signal processors, network processors, media accelerators, and other special purpose processors and accelerators; impact of technology on architecture; network and interconnect architectures; parallel I/O and storage systems; architecture of the memory hierarchy; power-efficient and green computing architectures; dependable architectures; and performance modeling and evaluation.

d) Parallel and distributed software, including parallel and multicore programming languages and compilers, runtime systems, operating systems, Internet computing and web services, resource management including green computing, middleware for grids, clouds, and data centers, libraries, performance modeling and evaluation, parallel programming paradigms, and programming environments and tools.

SCOPE OVERLAP with other IEEE periodicals:

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking: The proposed change of scope decreases the overlap with these Transactions by de-emphasizing from the scope “wireless (including ad hoc, delay-tolerant, vehicular and sensor) networks, mobile software systems”.

REASONS FOR REQUESTING SCOPE CHANGE:

The IEEE TPDS is the journal of first choice for researchers in parallel and distributed systems. The topics of coverage of the leading research in the community change over time as technology rapidly changes in the parallel and distributed processing area, and the TPDS scope should be updated to reflect these areas of interest and “hot topics” in the subfields of parallel and distributed systems. The revised scope brings these Transactions into better alignment with the IEEE Computer Society’s flagship conferences in these areas (IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, and the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems). The previous scope separated the sections on parallel systems and distributed systems. Recognizing that these topics are now often hard to separate, the primary change is to reorganize the scope to merge these topics of interest together into four main categories for algorithms, applications, architectures, and software. Several new areas are highlighted, including exascale computing, big data, and several areas are de-emphasized, including wireless and mobile networks. The de-emphasized topics already find a primary home in several other IEEE Transactions including IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

PROS:

The new scope updates and modernizes the current scope. It is important that the scope of the principal journal in the field of parallel and distributed systems be up-to-date. The change in scope will also reduce the administrative overhead of managing the transactions by allowing for the administrative reject of papers falling outside of the scope.

CONS:

The revised scope preserves all the aspects of the current scope, while updating and modernizing it. The only downside is that some authors in the area of wireless and mobile computing may not be enthusiastic about the de-emphasis of this area from the scope. However, there are several other IEEE Transactions that serve this community.