Special Issue: Selected Papers from Super Computing 2012

As the chairs for the SC12 Technical Papers, we were surprised and delighted to have the highest number of technical paper submissions ever to the SC conference series. Authors submitted 472 paper for review, and the 175 member program committee accepted 100 of these papers for presentation during the conference – an acceptance rate of 21%. From these 100 papers, the committee also nominated exceptional papers as finalists for Best Paper and Best Student Paper, numbering six and nine papers, respectively, with two papers in both categories. The authors of several of these finalist papers were offered the opportunity to publish extended versions of their papers in this special issue; ten authors accepted. Here, we provide a brief introduction to these ten papers. “Compiler-directed file layout optimization for hierarchical storage systems” by Wei Ding, Yuanrui Zhang, Mahmut Kandemir and Seung Woo Son. This paper describes a new perspective on optimizing file layouts for hierarchical storage caches using compilerdriven analysis. The fully automated method shows improvements on 16 I/O intensive workloads, increasing performance by 23.7% on average. “Efficient and reliable network tomography in heterogeneous networks using BitTorrent broadcasts and clustering algorithms” by Kiril Dichev, Fergal Reid and Alexey Lastovetsky. This paper describes a new solution to the problem of managing end-to-end bandwidth in BitTorrent-style data transfers. Their method