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Distributed processing serves as one of the key technologies of network-based communication and computing systems. We have witnessed the evolution of distributed computing over the past 30 years as the underlying networking environments kept changing and the application areas kept expanding. We can also foresee the new developments in the field in the coming years when we are facing the new challenges brought by increasing scale and dynamicity of systems, huge amount of data, and higher demand in support of emerging social, economical, and industrial applications.
Although extensive research and technological development have been carried out in distributed computing, many challenging problems remain open or appear in new forms. Mobile computing, pervasive computing, social computing, and cloud computing, all based on distributed processing, have overlapping or raise new requirements and research issues. Existing theories, algorithms and mechanisms need to be adapted or even totally re-designed to meet the new requirements of handling big data, increasing user mobility, smart portable devices, immersive sensing, mobile ad hoc networking, etc. We also need to reexamine the issues and propose new standards of scalability, inter-operability, fault tolerance, security and privacy from the new angles.
The IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Distributed Processing (TCDP) addresses the technical aspects of specifying, designing, implementing, and evaluating distributed computing systems. Specific topics of interest include executive and operating systems for decentralized control, logical and physical interconnection and communication, reliability and fault tolerance, systems and hardware architecture, distributed databases, and software specification, verification, applications, and systems. TCDP sponsors workshops and conference sessions on these and related topics, and sponsors the annual International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), along with International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS) and the International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT).
In the years to come, TCDP will continue to plan and implement activities that sustain and grow the community, including
- - preserving, fostering and nurturing the growth of our conferences,
- - encouraging existing members to continue and make more contributions,
- - recruiting more members including researchers, practitioners, policymakers and especially students,
- - building partnership with other technical committees while re-thinking the technical core themes that define our identity and distinctiveness.