In 2010 ACM SIGMETRICS, the ACM Special Interest Group for the computer systems performance evaluation community, inaugurated a “Test of Time Award.”
In steady-state, the SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award will recognize annually one performance evaluation paper whose impact is still felt 10-12 years after its initial publication in the proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS conference.
John Zahorjan
Ed Lazowska
To bootstrap the process, the inaugural ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award recognizes three papers published between 1973 and 1999 – essentially, the three papers of greatest impact from the first 27 years of ACM SIGMETRICS. The authors of these papers were recognized on June 17 at the ACM SIGMETRICS 2010 conference in New York.
One of the three papers is “A Comparison of Receiver-initiated and Sender-initiated Adaptive Load Sharing,” which was presented at the 1985 ACM SIGMETRICS conference by UW CSE’s Ed Lazowska and John Zahorjan along with their frequent collaborator Derek Eager from the University of Saskatchewan. (Eager, Lazowska and Zahorjan had the same thesis advisor at the University of Toronto, Kenneth C. Sevcik.) In a series of papers during that time frame, Eager, Lazowska and Zahorjan laid the foundation for policies that improve performance by distributing the computational load among the hosts in locally distributed systems.