OPODIS 2000 Travel report

Hkan Sundell
Department of Computing Science
Chalmers University of Technology

OPODIS 2000

OPODIS stands for On Principles on DIstributed Systems and is a international conference held yearly since 4 years back in time. This year it was taking part from December 20 to December 22 in year 2000 and was held in Paris, France. Most of the participants were from France but there were also quite a big contribution from the rest of Europe as well as North and South-America.

The official language was English although one talk actually was held in French with English slides. The presentations were altogether very good and the conference hall was very well-suited for the purpose with built-in video-projector and high quality audio system. The hall floor also were leaning downwards which ment that you could actually see the slides and the presenter from anywhere in the hall, which is different from some other conferences where you only can see the back and neck of the person in front of you. The conference hall were actually rented from a big commercial center, a huge science center in the north region of the central parts of Paris. This center is mainly thought of being a portal to young people and the public in technical and natural sciences, it is called citÈ des sciences & de l'industrie.

As a paper presenter, as myself, you got a quite good freedom to layout the talk in a way to really present the papers in a more educating way, as each presenter got plenty of time. The papers were divided in two sections, full papers with 45 minutes presentations and short papers with 30 minutes. In overall there were 14 papers presented and 2 invited talks. Although the conference was not focused on real-time systems, many papers touched this aspect in any way, like looking at bounding delays and etcteras which actually is part of real-time systems. Many presented self-stabilizing algorithms which also are applicable to distributed real-time systems, where fault-tolerance are considered. In my own area of mechanisms for avoiding the blocking problem connected with mutual exclusion there actually was one paper that looked on how to achieve mutual exclusion in a distributed system called "Self-stabilizing group mutual exclusion for asynchronous rings". Some papers also looked on aspects like QoS (Quality of Service) and multicasting. In overall I think the majority of the papers should be interesting to the real-time communitity, if not because they are considering real-time systems aspects but then perhaps more because they could be adopted to a real-time system environment.

In overall the conference was very well organized, and a lot of nice social events as well. The major was of course the evening with a high-class dinner up in the very Eiffel-tower, and the nice champagne testing event was also something to remember. Paris is a quite interesting city and has a lot of things worth to see, besides from Mona Lisa there a lot of other really nice things as well. Even you don't know a single word of french (as myself) you can manage quite well with english and gestures. As Paris is a big city with a lot of criminal problems you have though to be somewhat careful about yourself and your behaviour, we very actually advised not to be out on the subway (called Metro) after 10 pm.

The next conference in the OPODIS series will be held in Mexico.