Message from the Program Committee Chair

The CCGrid 2002 main conference received 108 submissions. Each paper was assigned to three Program Committee members, who reviewed the papers themselves or assigned them to external reviewers. The Program Committee consists of top researchers in cluster and grid computing who also are highly critical, which is reflected in the quality of the papers that survived the review process. The Chair is grateful to the PC members and the 91 external reviewers for all their hard and thorough work. They together produced 93% of the reviews that the Program Committee was supposed to generate. The missing reviews were done by a ´backup team´ that the Chair prepared in advance, to review papers during the weekend before the notification date. The team, consisting of 13 researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Freie Universitat Berlin, and Zuse Institute Berlin, did the last 21 reviews that were needed to make the right decisions. The Chair was impressed by the cooperation of these people, and would like to thank them again here. As a result, all papers have had at least three reviews, except for a few papers that received two rejects. Also, three papers were rejected because we discovered they were submitted in parallel to one or two other conferences. Due to the size of the Program Committee, we decided not to have a formal PC meeting. Instead, the Chair resolved conflicts between the reviews using e-mail discussions. The Chair started a discussion for 24 papers where the reviewers disagreed. Each reviewer obtained all reviews (anonymously) and commented on the other reviews. The active participation in these discussions was remarkable; virtually everyone involved responded quickly and gave useful additional comments. In the large majority of all cases, we reached an agreement. The Chair also obtained a fourth review or extra comments from yet other Program Committee members for the most difficult cases. The entire decision-making process was done anonymously (only - he Chair knew the reviewers´ identities). The outcome of this procedure was that 27 submissions were accepted as full papers, an acceptance rate of 25%. Two of these papers were accepted after the authors submitted a major revision, guided by a ´shepherd,´ which was refereed again. Several other papers (based on the reviews) were invited for presentation in the poster session. The authors of 12 of these papers accepted the invitation; their work is included as short (2-page) papers in the proceedings.