Decentralized priority control in data communication

摘要

A professional symposium should provide the attendees with the opportunities, i) to gain new knowledge and keep abreast of new developments in the field and 2) to express and exchange ideas with other attendees. We believe the Second Annual Symposium on Computer Architecture will achieve these goals.First of all we trust that anyone who reads this volume would agree with us that we have an abundance of high quality papers assembled here. As a matter of fact, it was most gratifying to us in organizing the symposium to find the tremendous enthusiastic response from the practitioners of the field in the form of the large number and high quality of papers submitted. The program committee, especially its chairman, of course, had to be faced with the difficult task of deciding how to limit the size of the technical program without leaving out any topic of importance. We are, however, pleased to say that every paper submitted was reviewed by no less than three referees and all papers accepted were rated as top quality by at least two of the referees. The result is a technical program consisting of twelve sessions with topics ranging from the architecture of computer networks to computer architeCture education. Within this broad spectrum, most every computer architect will find some novel and exciting topic that will benefit him professionally.No less encouraging and significant than the large number of papers being submitted, is the fact that over one third of them come from foreign countries. We are well aware of the fundamental contributions in computer architecture made by many European countries in the past. The full participation by those countries and others assure us that the state of art of research in computer architecture in the world will be reflected in the donference.Furthermore, we were able to organize in conjunction with the symposium a one day tutorial on microcomputers --a subject that really attracts the interest and fancy of many of us. So, for those who come here with the intentionof keeping themselves abreast in the field, they will not be disappointed.As far as facilitating the exchange of ideas among the attendees is concerned, we provide the following: We have scheduled an evening of panel discussion with a llst of distinguished speakers leading the discussion. We hope and expect to have some exciting and perhaps even heated debates on the current issues of computer architecture nOt only among the panelists but also with active participation from the floor. We have arranged a coffee break of half an hour after every one and a half hours of technical session so that the audience can have an additional chance to question the speakers closely while the subject is still fresh in everybody's mind. We provide a cocktail hour so that people can talk in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. We hold our meetings on the campus of the University of Houston away from the big hotels downtown so that attendees can seek one another out easily.Beginning this year, we established a best paper awardfor the symposium. Steve Szygenda, as program chairman of the previous symposium, assumes the chairmanship of the award committee. The committee will not only examine the papers but also evaluate the oral presentation of the candidates. The award will be presented to the winner in the next symposium.