Student Travel Support for SIGMETRICS 2009

The ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance 2009 Conference will be held in Seattle, WA, from June 15-19, 2009. Sigmetrics brings together 150 or more professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds in what has become a premier forum for discussing the development and application of state-of-the-art, broadly applicable analytic, simulation, and measurement-based performance evaluation techniques. There are several workshops and student activities also being organized along with Sigmetrics 2009 including:

? Student Thesis Panel that provides a live forum for students to promote and get feedback on their work, exchange research experiences, and interact with established researchers,

? Demo Competition to communicate research ideas in a live, interactive forum, and

? Industrial Information Session that would provide students a communication channel to interact with industrial researchers and learn more about their cutting-edge work. This proposal requests funding to support the conference registration and travel-related costs of 6 graduate students from the U.S. Participation in leading conferences is an extremely important part of the graduate school experience, providing the opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and to be exposed to leading edge work.

Intellectual Merit: The Sigmetrics conference emphasizes both innovative research and quantified or illuminating experience. Sigmetrics 2009 seeks to present innovative, exciting work related to all aspects of performance, including speed and scalability as well as reliability, availability, and

manageability of systems. Contributions containing highly original ideas, new approaches, and/or groundbreaking results are particularly encouraged. There will also be a poster session for the presentation of promising preliminary work.

Broader Impact: The support requested in this proposal will make possible the participation of students who would otherwise be unable to attend. Particular attention will be paid to directing support towards under-represented minorities including women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Native Pacific Islanders. The support will provide students who attend

with the opportunity to interact with mentors and peers of varying sex, ethnicity and background.