A Workshop on Feedback Control of Computing Systems is supported by NSF in May, 2005, to bring together key academic and industrial researchers in the field of control of computing systems. In addition to suggesting new research problems and identifying gaps in current theory and practice, the workshop goal is to assess viability, importance, potential, and expected impact of key recent contributions and research directions in the field.
This workshop is motivated by two considerations. The first is progress made in control of computing systems in the current decade. Accelerated research efforts were conducted in different research communities including Networking, Hybrid Control, Real-time and Embedded Computing, Quality-of-Service, Web Architecture, Databases, Distributed Systems, among others. A second consideration is the demonstration that control theory can be used effectively by software practitioners in the development of commercial products, such as IBM's experience with autonomic features in DB2. The workshop seeks a unified view of the field that identifies commonalities between isolated research problems, provides opportunities to generalize, develops broad theoretical foundations for this new class of control problems in which the controlled process is a (typically distributed) software entity, and identifies likely application areas for practical impact. The workshop provides an opportunity for an interdisciplinary exchange to identify key research problems that are fundamental, cross-cutting, and most broadly applicable within the software system control domain. A compilation of the results is to be made publicly available and disseminated through published reports in control and computer science magazines and newsletters.
