Agent based High Performance Computing ``Problem Solving Applications and Practical Deployment'' at Autonomous Agents 1999 Seattle, Washington, USA May 1 to 5, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Workshop Web Site: http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/User/O.F.Rana/agents99/ Autonomous Agents 1999 Web Site: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/agents99/ WORKSHOP OVERVIEW ================= The workshop will cover the role of agent based technologies in parallel/high performance computing. The current change in emphasis, from `high performance parallel' computing to `high performance parallel/distributed' computing on commodity computing platforms, has meant new techniques becoming useful (and possible) in scientific computing. The use of code mobility (using mobile agents), and the use of speech-acts (through KQML, FIPA) has meant that agent technology has opened up new research areas in scientific computing, and could potentially lead to new applications areas, in resource management, commercial applications such as data mining and data warehousing. In order to make these problem solving agent applications possible we need to understand how to deploy agents on a large scale. There are many aspects of this problem, including mechanisms to support large numbers of agents, and how a large number of agents function. Agent deployment must be sufficiently robust and reliable, so that scientists and commercial organisations will entrust agents with mission critical applications. This workshop will be organised around two themes: * The application of agents to problem solving applications, such as scientific computing research or large scale business problems * Examination of the practical issues of deploying such problem solving systems. This workshop is particularly aimed at fostering interaction between researchers and practitioners in the high performance computing and agents communities. It will allow investigators to demonstrate new work, or new research results, which apply to these areas. The workshop includes, but is not restricted to, the following general areas: Practical Deployment * Performance analysis/modeling of multi-agent systems * Performance enhancement methodologies for mobile and multi-agent systems * Agent communication over MPI/PVM * Agents in problem solving environments * Recommender agents for scientific problem solving * Computational steering using agents * Software updates and component distribution via mobile agents * Agent based load balancing * Agents based network characterisation for high performance computing * Agent based resource discovery * Agent based real time multimedia and embedded systems The Practical Deployment Problems part of the workshop will examine issues related to deploying large, robust, distributed multi-agent systems. Discussion can include such areas as: Communication * How do agent communication mechanisms scale to support many agents? * How does the agent's naming scheme scale to support a huge number of systems, services, and agents? How does the name-resolution mechanism scale? * What is the impact of communication processing on network load when many distant agents are communicating? * How reliable does communication have to be? What support is needed for network disconnection, due to Internet failures or due to purposeful disconnection of the host machine? * How do the negotiation protocols that lie at the heart of ACL (Agent Communications Languages) designs scale? What role can strategies such as caching and adaptive searching play in cutting down the time needed to perform common actions, such as converge on a common ontology. * An agent can perform actions in other locations in several ways. It can migrate there, and perform the action. It can communicate with an agent located in the appropriate locale, and ask that the other agent to perform the action. The agent can remotely invoke code in the other locale. Each of these has different costs associated with it, such as speed, or network traffic. There are other variables, such as agent size, required reliability and state, and access permissions. What are the kinds of research we need to know which model is best for various different usage scenarios? Robustness and Persistence * How can we move or update agents or agent servers without starting and stopping them? * Given the possibility of thousands of agents running on a single server, what are the mechanisms we need to support agent persistence, such as reactivate-on-event and checkpointing? For large (possibly intelligent) agents, how can we efficiently handle the persistence of long-term data? Applied Technology: Problem Solving Agents ------------------------------------------ Implementations in particular scientific computing domains will also be considered, and submission of work-in-progress, or work completed, is encouraged. Possible application domains include: * Molecular dynamics * BioInformatics and protein sequence processing * Fluid dynamics * Collaborative virtual reality for science and engineering * Climate modeling * Computational cosmology * Geological modeling Related applications in finance: -------------------------------- * Financial forecasting over large data sets * Agent based scalable data warehousing * Electronic commerce * Enterprise wide intranet applications PAPER SUBMISSION ================ Papers should report new work and should be printable on 8.5x11 paper using 12 point type (10 characters per inch for typewriters). Each page must have no more than 38 lines and an average of 75 characters per line. (This corresponds to LaTeX article style, 12 point.) Paper bodies should be no longer than 5000 words, including references and figures (assumed to represent the number of words they replace on the manuscript page). Over-length papers will either be rejected or penalised in the review process. All papers will be reviewed by the programme committee, and selected on their originality, timeliness, relevance and clarity. Electronic submission is preferred. Please email a PostScript or PDF copy of your submission to Omer Rana (omer@cs.cf.ac.uk) before February 15, 1999. You may also send paper copies to Omer Rana, Department of Computer Science, Cardiff University, PO Box916, Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK or Kate Stout (Kate.Stout@sun.com), Sun Microsystems, 2 Elizabeth Drive, Chelmsford, MA 02124, USA. Papers will be posted on the workshop web site prior to the workshop, to allow attendees to read materials before the workshop. Submission Deadline: February 15, 1999 PAPER PRESENTATION ================== All presentations must be between 20 to 25 minutes. This will be followed by a directed discussion of the presentation. The discussion will be lead by some members of the program committee. Towards the end of the workshop, the general issues generated from the workshop will be examined. WORKSHOP CHAIRS =============== Professor David Walker Kate Stout Department of Computer Science, Agent Research Team, Sun Labs Cardiff University, Sun Microsystems, PO Box 916, 2 Elizabeth Drive, Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK Chelmsford, MA 02124, USA email: david@cs.cf.ac.uk phone: 978-442-0948 email: Kate.Stout@sun.com WORKSHOP ORGANISERS =================== Omer Rana Professor David Kotz Parallel and Scientific Computing Department of Computer Science, Group, Dartmouth College, Department of Computer Science, Hanover, Cardiff University, New Hampshire 03755, USA PO Box 916, email: dfk@cs.dartmouth.edu Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK email: omer@cs.cf.ac.uk phone: +44 1222 875 542 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE =================== David Walker Cardiff University, UK David Kotz Dartmouth College, USA Omer Rana Cardiff University, UK Kate Stout Sun Microsystems, Massachusetts, USA Philippe De Wilde Imperial College, London, UK Mark Baker Portsmouth University, UK Siamek Hasanzadeh Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto, USA Geofferey Fox Syracuse University, USA Vladimir Getov University of Westminster, UK Lyndon Lee BT Labs, UK Anupam Joshi University of Maryland, USA Jean-Louis Pazat EuroTools and IRISA, France Serge Chaumette LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, France Elias Houstis Purdue University, USA Micheal Fisher Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo Teleinformatics Group, University of Geneva, Switzerland Jeremy Baxter DERA, UK Paolo Petta Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence Erann Gat JPL, Caltech, USA Katia Sycara Carnegie Mellon, USA Danny Lange General Magic, USA Luciano Serafini Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Italy Jan Treur Informatics, Vrije University, Netherlands Anna Ciampolini University of Bologna, Italy Kurt Rothermel IPVR, Universitaet Stuttgart, Germany Naren Ramakrishnan Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, USA Hyacinth Nwana BT Labs, UK Piyush Mehrotra ICASE, NASA Langley, USA Hillol Kargupta Washington State University, USA Jeffrey Bradshaw Intelligent Agent technology, Boeing, USA Bent Thomsen ICL, UK Denis Caromel INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France Maria Gini University of Minnesota, USA Giacomo Piccinelli Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, UK ------------------------------------------------------------------------