By Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne, Australia
To face the challenges of the new millennium and to benefit from the opportunities emerging from it, the Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) needs to provide a dynamic forum that enables and promotes active interaction and networking between researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government. The key objectives of the forum are to provide various avenues for (a) creating, sharing and exchanging knowledge and ideas, (b) building links between researchers from academia with practitioners from industry, (c) developing new collaborative activities and projects between members, (d) guiding young and emerging researchers, and (e) promoting standards and educational programs at regional and international levels. My goal as Chair is to realize these objectives effectively, and to assist our members in maintaining their competitive edge. With your help, I plan to emphasize and promote the following key concepts and programs:
- Technical forums on emerging issues in scalable computing (SC)
- Cost-effective and high-quality conferences hosted by TCSC— for example, I would like to promote the concept of treating student attendees as first class participants by offering them services similar to those generally offered to full-fee paying attendees and I seek to achieve this through industrial and government sponsorships and grants
- Initiate and promote industry forums to be hosted at TCSC conferences to develop better links between industry and academia
- Initiate a mentoring program for young researchers by establishing a body of international experts who are willing to volunteer their time and energy for guiding or commenting on research proposals and projects
- Promote educational programs by:
- Encouraging the sharing of thoughts on teaching and teaching material
- establishing an active book donation program
- Exploring the inclusion of emerging topics within SC in IEEE-CS/ACM Curriculum guidelines
- Organization of doctoral forums:
- To encourage students to pose questions and discuss pertinent issues with fellow doctoral students and
- To maintain information links that provide direct access to a variety of resources to assist in their research
- Establish regional TCSC forums to develop stronger links between regional and international communities
- Promote collaborative projects with sister TCs within the Computer Society and outside such as ACM
- Establish an effective and state-of-the-art TCSC Web portal and regularly publish a TCSC newsletter with interesting technical stories and articles
- Active participation in the Society’s Technical Activities Board (TAB) and ensure that the needs of our members are recognized and met, and
- Actively seek new volunteers and recognize their contribution by nominating them for IEEE service awards.
Although this seems like a long list of objectives to be achieved, I am confident of realizing them for TCSC with your support.
About Rajkumar Buyya
Rajkumar Buyya is a Associate Professor and the Director of the Grid Computing and Distributed Systems Laboratory within the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has authored/co-authored over 200 papers and technical documents that include three books—Microprocessor x86 Programming, Mastering C++, and Design of PARAS Microkernel. The books on emerging topics that he edited include, High Performance Cluster Computing published by Prentice Hall, USA, 1999; and High Performance Mass Storage and Parallel I/O, IEEE and Wiley Press, USA, 2001. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Future Generation Computing Systems (FGCS). Buyya received B.E, M.E, and Ph.D. degrees from Mysore, Bangalore, and Monash Universities respectively. He was awarded Dharma Ratnakara Memorial Trust Gold Medal in 1992 for his academic excellence in Mysore University. He received Richard E. Merwin Scholarship Award in 1999 for demonstrating outstanding involvement in an IEEE Computer Society student branch chapter, excellence in academic achievement, and promise in future professional efforts. He received leadership and service excellence awards from the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC) in 2000 and 2003 and a StorageTek Fellowship in 2004. Buyya has been active within the IEEE Computer Society since 1999 when he co-founded the Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC). As Co-Chair of the TFCC, he has played a major role in the initiation and execution of many technical activities, conferences, and educational programs such as the well subscribed book donation program. He served as a speaker in the Chapter Tutorials Program (from 1999-2001) and presented tutorials on emerging topics in IEEE Sections and Chapters based in Australia, Europe and India. He has also been part of the Executive Committee of the Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. Currently, he is serving as Chair of the Technical Committee on Scalable Computing.
