SPECTS’2000 offers a unique forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share their expertise results and achievements in all areas of performance evaluation of computer and telecommunications systems including simulation, analytic modeling and measurements. 

The rapid progress in high performance computing/computers has an important impact on many technologies including performance evaluation of computer and telecommunication systems. Recent advances in computing power have provided us with processors that operate at a speed of 1.5 GHz with a factor of improvement of almost two in less than six months. The evolution of computers has been characterized by increasing processor speed, decreasing chip size, increasing memory size, increasing I/O capacity and speed. One major factor that facilitates the great increase in processor speed is the shrinking size of the microprocessor components. This reduces the distance between components and therefore increases speed. However, the real gains in speed in recent years have come from the organization of processor including heavy use of pipelining, parallel execution techniques, and the use of speculative execution techniques such as predictive branching which result in the tentative execution of future instructions that might be needed. Of course, all of these techniques are designed to keep the processor busy as much as possible. One critical issue in the design of computer systems is balancing the performance of various elements, so that gains in performance in one area are not handicapped by a lag in other areas. Specifically, processor speeds have increased more rapidly than memory speeds. Various techniques have been devised to overcome this mismatch including caches, more intelligent memory devices, and wider data paths from memory to processor, among others. It is important to state that performance evaluation has played a great role in this advancement.

Progress in computer networks and telecommunications systems is also amazing. There are new efficient switching techniques, networks topologies, protocols, analysis and simulation methodologies, benchmarking and traffic engineering techniques, wireless and cellular techniques, encryption and authentication schemes, Gigabit Ethernet, high speed routers, high performance ATM technologies including ATM switches that can switch terabits per second, high bandwidth connection to the Internet, Web-based computing and communications, among others. The release of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the 1990’s has moved the Internet and telecommunications to the mainstream. The Internet has brought the Internet into the homes and businesses of millions of people worldwide. The Web has also served as a platform for enabling and deploying hundreds of applications, including online stock trading, and banking, e-commerce, streamed multimedia services, and information retrieval services. ATM technology has been deployed very aggressively within both telephone networks and the Internet backbones. Such new technologies and applications require performance evaluation at various phases. 

This conference offers a unique forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government to share their expertise, results, and achievements in all areas of performance evaluation of computer and telecommunication systems, including simulation, analytic modeling, measurement, benchmarking, tracing, and traffic engineering. 

This year’s SPECTS includes a superb technical program, four distinguished speakers, Professor Raj Jain, Professor Erole Gelenbe, Adm. Fred Lewis, and Dr. Dennis McBride. Also, we have insightful tutorials (professional Development Seminars) that will improve your knowledge and expertise in several areas related to the conference. We have chosen Coast Plaza Suite Hotel at Stanley Park, in Vancouver as a site for our conference. The hotel provides excellent meeting facilities and will be a comfortable setting for our conference. Vancouver is rich in many tourist and cultural attractions as well as its gorgeous setting.

The theme of this year’s conference is,” Performance evaluation is vital for efficient system design in the next millennium” reflects the importance of this discipline in the new millennium where computer and telecommunication systems and their applications are becoming more and more complex, and globally widespread.

The program consists of two parallel tracks per day and it will last for three days. Each track has three sessions. The topics covered in the program include ATM systems, high speed networks, high performance computing/computers, memory systems, internet, wireless communications, parallel and distributed systems, computer architecture, queues, TCP/IP systems, fault-tolerant systems, authentication, parallel  and distributed simulation, QoS, routing, flow control, client –server systems, GSM, load balancing, multimedia, and web-based applications. We received this year a large number of good quality papers this year. We accepted only very high quality papers. We have two categories of accepted papers, regular papers and short papers. Regular papers were allowed a maximum of 8 printed 2-column pages per paper, while short papers were allocated a maximum of 5 printed 2-coluns pages per paper. 

Many individuals have contributed to the success of this conference. My sincere thanks go to all authors including those whose papers were not included in the program. Many thanks go to the technical program committee members and their reviewers, international liaisons, session chairs, and the dedicated efforts of the SPECTS’2k executive committee and steering committee, who have sacrificed their time to make this event a first-class conference. Special thanks go to Professor Franco Davoli, SPECTS’2K Program Chair, for his tireless work in finalizing this outstanding technical program. Thanks are due to Professor Marco Ajmone Marsan, SPECTS’2K Vice General Chair, Professor Ibrahim Onyuksel and Professor Omar Hamami, Vice Program Chairs for their suggestions. Special thanks go to Dr. Mohammad Radaideh, Publicity Chair of SPECTS’2K, for his dedicated work in publicizing the conference, and maintaining and updating the web site of the conference. Thanks are also due to the staff of the SCS for their fine support. 

Finally, on behalf of the Executive and Steering Committees of SPECTS’2000, and the Society for Computer Simulation International, I invite all of you to enjoy the conference and the gorgeous July weather of Vancouver.