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18th International Workshop

on High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS)

November 3-6, 2019

Asilomar Conference Grounds

Pacific Grove, CA

Every two years, HPTS brings together a lively and opinionated group of technologists to discuss and debate the pressing topics that affect today's systems and their design and implementation, especially where performance and scalability is concerned. The workshop includes position paper presentations, panels, moderated discussions, and significant time for casual interaction. The presentations are not recorded, and the only publications are slide decks by presenters, who are strongly encouraged to post them.

Since its inception in 1985, HPTS has always been about large-scale systems --- systems that extend the state-of-the-art. Over the years the focus has expanded from scalable transaction processing to very large databases to cloud computing. Today, scalability is also about data analytics, machine learning and globally distributed systems. Here are some of the questions and topics we hope 2019 participants will address:

• Data Stores
• State of the art in transaction coordination and consistency mechanisms.
• What are the challenges for data stores that exploit novel memory architectures?
• How can we best measure performance in the presence of failure modes?
• Who's doing the best job of working around global latencies and the CAP theorem nowadays?
• How do we design data stores for the serverless computing era?
• Explore the continuum between how cheaply and how fast we can store and process data.
• Hardware
• How have changes in relative speed and cost of computing, storing and networking changed the ways that large-scale systems are (or should be) implemented?
• What are the challenges in pushing vertical scalability to the limit, without becoming too fragile?
• Latest innovation in networks and how those are utilized by data management systems.
• How can the raw capacity of GPU based systems be leveraged effectively?
• Can we get a sustained benefit from FPGA and custom ASICs over improvements in CPUs and GPUs?
• Novel memory architectures: non-volatile memory, processor in memory, multi-Terabyte RAM.
• Distributed Systems
• How to build and manage distributed systems with partially connected nodes at scale?
• How do we debug failures in serverless applications?
• Extracting actionable events from a flood of distributed unstructured logging data.
• How can we keep track of applications with ephemeral components that come and go in seconds?
• Verification of systems, proving system correctness with minimal coordination.
• Platforms
• Lifecycle of applications at scale: As hardware and system layers evolve, and as scale increases, how are services and applications maintained and extended?
• Can we provide safety properties using coordination at the application level?
• What are the challenges in scaling and training deep learning based applications?
• What new applications will be driving scalability requirements in the next few years?
• How should we build applications that reliably and durably process billions of dollars every day?

Others topics are welcome, as long as they are likely to be of interest to people building large-scale systems.

If you would like to attend, please submit a one-page technical position paper that presents a viewpoint on a controversial topic, a summary of lessons learned, experience with a large or unusual system, an innovative mechanism, an enormous problem looming on the horizon, or anything else that convinces the program committee that you have something interesting to say to builders of large-scale systems. The submission process is very lightweight, in part to attract systems developers who can't set aside time to write a paper. Each submission can have many authors. However, if a submission is accepted, only the primary author will receive an invitation to attend. At most one submission per primary author, please.

The workshop is by invitation only and will have under 100 participants. The submissions drive both the invitation process and the workshop agenda. Participants may be asked to give a presentation at the workshop. Students are particularly encouraged to submit and will enjoy a discounted workshop fee.

What to submit:

• A one-page abstract or position statement, as text or as a link to a pdf, in 10pt font or larger.
• Optionally, a short summary of the corresponding author's current work, such as a link to the author's homepage or LinkedIn page, or a short bio added to the position statement (beyond the one page).
• Optionally, a link to one or both of the following:
• Maximum of 3 PowerPoint or pdf slides, augmenting your position statement.
• Maximum 2-minute video illustrating your position statement, such as a demo or a presentation of you speaking (with or without slides).

The length limits will be strictly enforced. We won't consider submissions that exceed the maximum length.

The workshop begins with dinner on Sunday, November 3 and ends with lunch on Wednesday, November 6. Submissions will be collected using a google form and can be revised up to midnight Pacific time on the due date of April 30th. Notifications of acceptance will be made on June 21th.

Where to submit: https://goo.gl/forms/QSwoHAespfGgRje

Questions: hpts2019@gmail.com

Important Dates:

• Position Papers Due: April 30, 2019
• Notification of Acceptance: June 21, 2019
• HPTS Workshop: November 3-6, 2019