Wrapping Up ICPE 2024: A Milestone Event in Performance Engineering

By Cristina L. Abad, William Knottenbelt and Weiyi Shang

We are delighted to share insights and highlights from the recently concluded 15th annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) 2024, held May 7-11th in the historic and vibrant city of London. ICPE has been the flagship conference in the area of performance engineering over the years and has a tradition of bringing together both academic scholars and industrial practitioners in discussing the recent advances in the area.

This year’s event, located at Imperial College London in South Kensington, hosted more than 130 attendees who participated in a rich program spanning keynote speeches, research and industrial presentations, and collaborative workshops. The conference facilitated discussions and networking among attendees from people across the globe, including academia, industry, and research institutions.

Our keynote sessions featured talks from three distinguished keynote speakers:

• Manzoor Mohammed, cofounder of Capacitas, provided an in-depth look at how understanding performance empowers organizations to extract the full potential of their cloud, transforming cost into strategic advantage.
• Prof Jane Hillston, from the University of Edinburgh, presented initial ideas of what it could mean to develop a framework of performance evaluation for foundational AI models such as large language models.
• Dr Giuliano Casale, from Imperial College London, discussed QoS management and deployment problems arising in Edge AI systems.

These talks sparked lively discussions and set the tone for the innovative and forward-thinking atmosphere of the conference.

The technical sessions were particularly robust this year, featuring 18 research papers, eight industrial papers, seven emerging research papers, three journal first papers and five data challenge presentations. In particular, this is the first time in ICPE history that the conference included presentations from accepted journal papers (journal-first papers) to further enrich the program. The conference also featured seven co-located workshops with various interesting topics. The events cover diverse topics from cloud computing, performance testing, performance benchmarking to performance of AI-related software.

Special Moments and Awards

A highlight of ICPE 2024 was the presentation of the SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award to Dr Shreshth Tuli of Imperial College London, whose dissertation on “AI and Co-Simulation Driven Resource Management in Fog Computing Environments,” made significant advancements in delivering QoS management algorithms for Fog computing. Additionally, the Best Paper Award was given to a group of scholars from Vrije University Amsterdam, who conducted a study on performance characterization of Linux storage schedulers in the NVMe Era.

Gratitude and Looking Forward

We would like to express our gratitude to all the attendees, speakers, and sponsors of ICPE 2024. We would like to also thank the ICPE 2024 organizing committee as well as everyone who helped make the event a success:

General Chairs

• Simonetta Balsamo, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy
• William Knottenbelt, Imperial College London, UK

Research Program Chairs

• Cristina L. Abad, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Ecuador
• Weiyi Shang, University of Waterloo, Canada

Journal-First Chairs

• Cristina L. Abad, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, ESPOL, Ecuador
• Weiyi Shang, University of Waterloo, Canada

Industry Track Chair

• Alexander Podelko, Amazon/AWS, USA

Emerging Research Track Chairs

• Vittoria de Nitto Personè, Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy
• Lishan Yang, George Mason University, USA

Artifact Evaluation Chairs

• Robert Ricci, University of Utah, USA
• Dmitry Duplyakin, NREL, USA

Workshop Chairs

• Diego Costa, Concordia University, Canada
• Michele Tucci, University of L'Aquila, Italy

Tutorial Chair

• Heng Li, Polytechnique Montreal, Canada

Posters and Demos Chairs

• André Bauer, University of Chicago, USA
• Martin Sträßer. University of Würzburg, Germany

Data Challenge Chairs

• Luca Traini, University of L'Aquila, Italy
• Christoph Laaber, Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, Norway

Awards Chairs

• Katinka Wolter, Freie Universitaet zu Berlin, Germany
• Marin Litoiu, York University, Canada

Publicity & Social-Media Chairs

• Marco Paolieri, University of Southern California, USA

Finance Chair

• Tom Curtin, Imperial College London, UK

Publications Chairs

• Mauro Iacono, Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Italy
• Jianing Qiu, Imperial College London, UK

Web Chair

• Giordano d'Aloisio, University of L'Aquila, Italy

Looking to the future, we are excited about the growth of the area of performance engineering. As planned, ICPE 2025 will be held in April or May 2025, in Toronto, Canada. ICPE 2025 will be chaired by Marin Litoiu from York University, Canada and Evgenia Smirni from William and Mary, USA. The Program Committee Chairs will be Katinka Wolter from Freie Universitaet zu Berlin, and Alessandro Papadopoulos from Mälardalen University. The call for papers will be announced in late 2024.

Thank you once again for being a part of ICPE 2024. We hope to see you next year in Toronto!

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