IEEE Internet Computing provides journal-quality evaluation and review of emerging and maturing Internet technologies and applications. The magazine targets the technical and scientific Internet user communities as well as designers and developers of Internet-based applications and enabling technologies. IC publishes refereed articles on the latest developments and key trends in Internet technologies and applications.

A crossroads between academic researchers and software professionals, the magazine presents novel content from academic and industry experts on a wide range of topics, including applications, architectures, information management, middleware, policies, security, and standards.

In addition to peer-reviewed articles, IC features industry reports, surveys, tutorials, columns, and news.

Special Issue on Evolution of Rack-Scale Systems
Submission Date: 2017-10-13

In just the past few years, advances in software and hardware technology have enabled new computing paradigms and new applications making use of rack-scale computing environments. These include super-fast interconnects, new memory devices and architectures, and ever-changing software models. For instance, we recently witnessed a strong shift from virtual machines to containers as the model for deploying software in shared environments.

This special issue will include papers from both industry and academia that encompass the recent evolution of rack-scale systems, in the context of Internet computing. Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

1.Applications and use cases
- data-intensive analytics and graph processing
- financial, medical, and transportation scenarios

2.Systems software stack
- operating systems
- virtual machines (VMs), containers, unikernels and microservices
- persistency libraries and inter-process communication (IPC) stacks

3.Architecture
- memory/storage architectures
- switches, routers, and software-defined networking
- accelerators

4.Technologies
- nonvolatile memory
- photonic interconnects
- system on a chip

5.Characteristics
- security
- reliability (such as erasure coding)
- scale and performance