Context and Scope

Cloud computing promises to deliver computational resources on demand as services that are commoditised and delivered like traditional utilities, such as electricity, gas, water and telephony. Utility with cloud services can already be achieved for compute, storage and communication resources but also for hosted software and data. To enable the increasing scenarios of use requires timely, repeatable and controllable methodologies for evaluation of new cloud applications, products and policies.

The impact of this is keenly felt across the scientific computing/e-Science/computational science domains: reproducibility is crucial to the scientific process; without it researchers cannot verify, replicate or build upon findings. The challenges faced can be technological, policy-based, organisational and educational. However, the development and emergence of new hardware, tools and platforms means that reproducibility should be easier than ever before. But to do so, we need to effect a culture change that will embed computational reproducibility into the research process. Recent community initiatives such as the Recomputation Manifesto have raised the profile and scale of the problem, but there is still significant work to be done. While there has been much discussion of the importance of reproducibility of research, along with highlighting the role of research software engineers, Software Carpentry, “executable” papers, sharing source code, tools and infrastructure, this will be the first workshop to focus explicitly on recomputability and reproducibility in the context of utility and cloud computing.

Affiliated to UCC 2014, Recomputability 2014 will provide an interdisciplinary forum for academic and industrial researchers, practitioners and developers to discuss challenges, ideas, policy and practical experience in reproducibility, recomputation, reusability and reliability across utility and cloud computing. It will provide an opportunity to share and showcase best practice, as well as to provide a platform to further develop policy, initiatives and practical techniques for researchers in this domain. Participation by early career researchers is strongly encouraged.

Proposed topics of interest include (but are not limited to)

• infrastructure, tools and environments for recomputabilty and reproducibility in the cloud;
• recomputability for virtual machines;
• virtual machines as self-contained research objects or demonstrators;
• describing and cataloging cloud setups;
• the role of community/open access experimental frameworks and repositories for virtual machines and data, their operation and sustainability;
• validation and verification of experimental results by the community;
• sharing and publication issues;
• recommending policy changes for recomputability and reproducibility;
• improving education and training: best practice, novel uses, case studies;
• encouraging industry’s role in recomputability and reproducibility.

Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit papers electronically through EasyChair; we invite submissions of up to six pages in length (in IEEE format for conference proceedings) that will lead to improvements for recomputability and reproducibility in utility and cloud computing. The proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society and will be made available online through the IEEE Digital Library. The papers will be used by the organising committee to design sessions that will be interactive and targeted towards facilitating action. The organisers will also invite one or more submitters of provocative papers to start the workshop by presenting highlights of their papers in a keynote presentation to initiate active discussion that will continue throughout the day. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop and all workshop participants must pay the UCC 2014 conference registration fee.

Important Dates

• Paper Submissions: 10 August 2014 17 August 2014
• Notification of Acceptance: 29 August 2014 15 September 2014
• Camera-Ready Submission: 29 September 2014
• Early Registration Deadline: 29 September 2014
• Recomputability 2014 Workshop: 11 December 2014