We cordially invite you to participate in this three-day international Dagstuhl Seminar, which is designed to promote multidisciplinary research related to the economics of complex computer systems. This intimate forum will bring together a select group of thirty leading experts from both academia and industry, with interests at the intersection of computer science, economics, and game theory.

Existing venues tend to focus primarily on specific communities, such as game theorists meeting at ACM EC, European practitioners gathering at GECON, and computer systems researchers attending conferences like ASPLOS, where they typically find few peers working on computer economics. We believe that the seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl will be a unique opportunity to help bridge these communities. In Dagstuhl, accomplished representatives from these areas can meet, exchange ideas, engage in social activities, and make lasting connections.

Seminar participants will present and discuss their ongoing work and ideas. Then, divided into groups by research interest, they will plan collaborative research. At the closing session, each group will present its research plans. After the seminar ends, we expect to extend these plans and present them in white papers and journal publications, with the goal of enhancing multidisciplinary research on the economics of complex computer systems.

As you know, research on leveraging economic techniques to analyze and control complex computer systems is an important and timely topic. Modern systems – ranging from ad-hoc networks of devices to large data centers that support cloud infrastructure and supercomputing – require significant capital expenditures and consume large amounts of energy. Classic computer-science approaches are often inadequate for efficiently addressing the interests of the diverse entities, groups, and individuals that fund, manage and use such systems. Ideas from economics and game theory provide compelling alternatives for deciding how to share limited resources among parties with potentially-conflicting interests.

Economically-efficient computing systems include techniques for resource allocation, scheduling, and queuing, integrating pricing mechanisms such as auctions. These systems cannot be built by experts from a single discipline. It takes researchers who understand the problems and the limitations of computer systems. It requires practitioners with the experience to know what can work with real users – solutions that are too complicated will not be adopted. It takes economists and game theorists to define problems formally and prove they can work. And it needs systems and industry experts to evaluate solutions in real environments and demonstrate improvements in monetary costs, power consumption, and overall utility for users.

We hope you will be able to join us in making this seminar a great success!

Creative Commons BY 3.0 DE

Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda, Jörn Altmann, and Carl Waldspurger