PODC

This volume contains the 39 papers and 36 brief announcements presented at the 23rd ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), which was held from July 25 to 28, 2004, in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. This year, PODC included a special track on Algorithms and Data Structures for the Internet, chaired by Michael Mitzenmacher. The special track papers competed with the other papers for acceptance. (The numbers 39 and 36 above include special track papers.) The goal of this track was to enhance the integration within PODC of new and relevant subjects in distributed computing. We would like PODC to continue attracting papers in these areas. Similarly, the submission of papers in areas that were emphasized in recent years was also encouraged (e.g., papers in security of distributed systems, and in the implementation, analysis, evaluation, and deployment of real systems). Another event for this year was the co-location with the PODC Workshop on Concurrency and Synchronization in Java Programs. The goal was to promote interaction between PODC and the community of researchers investigating synchronization in actual platforms such as Java.The contributed papers were selected from 224 submissions to the regular presentations track and 90 submissions to the brief announcements track. The selection was done using electronic discussions as well as multiple phone conference calls. The regular presentations were read and evaluated by the program committee, aided by other members of the community as needed. However, as in previous years, the papers were not formally refereed; it is expected that many of these papers will appear in more polished form in fully refereed scientific journals. A selection of papers will appear in a special issue of Distributed Computing dedicated to PODC 2004. The brief announcements were screened by the program committee based on short abstracts; it is expected that many of them will be published elsewhere (including in other conferences).The number of submissions to PODC has grown very fast over the last very few years. We coped with the high number this year by several methods, including increasing the number of accepted papers, and extending the evaluation period as well as the program committee meeting period. We also tried to provide the authors with more detailed reviews, given the tougher competition, even though this increased the size of an already large task. The competition among the papers was very fierce, and many very good papers were not accepted. Similarly, many very good brief announcements were not accepted. I think that the fact that PODC manages to attract a growing interest shows that PODC manages to remain relevant to the growing "boom" in distributed computing. Still, if the area continues to grow, PODC may need to try additional ways to deal with its size. Finally, this year PODC includes posters. (The posters are not included in the proceedings, but the collection of the posters is published as a Technical Report.On behalf of the Program Committee, I would like to thank all the authors who submitted extended abstracts for consideration. As mentioned above, we think that many papers that were not accepted are very good, and it is really a pity we could not fit more of them into the program. We hope to see their authors in this PODC, and in future PODCs.