This Festschrift volume, pubished in honor of Ugo Montanari on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 43 papers, written by friends and colleagues, all leading scientists in their own right, who congregated at a celebratory symposium held on June 12, 2008, in Pisa. The volume consists of seven sections, six of which are dedicated to the main research areas to which Ugo Montanari has contributed: Graph Transformation; Constraint and Logic Programming; Software Engineering; Concurrency; Models of Computation; and Software Verification. Each of these six sections starts with an introductory paper giving an account of Ugo Montanari’s contribution to the area and describing the papers in the section. The final section consists of a number of papers giving a laudation of Ugo Montanari’s numerous achievements.

Graph grammars originated in the late 60s, motivated by considerations about pattern recognition and compiler construction. Since then, the list of areas which have interacted with the development of graph grammars has grown quite impressively. Besides the aforementioned areas, it includes software specification and development, VLSI layout schemes, database design, modeling of concurrent systems, massively parallel computer architectures, logic programming, computer animation, developmental biology, music composition, visual languages, and many others.The area of graph grammars and graph transformations generalizes formal language theory based on strings and the theory of term rewriting based on trees. As a matter of fact, within the area of graph grammars, graph transformation is considered as a fundamental computation paradigm where computation includes specification, programming, and implementation. Over the last three decades, graph grammars have developed at a steady pace into a theoretically attractive and important-for-applications research field.Volume 3 of the indispensable Handbook of Graph Grammars and Computing by Graph Transformations presents the research on concurrency, parallelism, and distribution — important paradigms of modern computer science. The topics considered include semantics for concurrent systems, modeling of concurrency, mobile and coordinated systems, algebraic specifications, Petri nets, visual design of distributed systems, and distributed algorithms. The contributions have been written in a tutorial/survey style by the top experts.

These Transactions publish archival papers in the broad area of Petri nets and other models of concurrency, ranging from theoretical work to tool support and industrial applications. ToPNoC issues are published as LNCS volumes, and hence are widely distributed and indexed. This Journal has its own Editorial Board which selects papers based on a rigorous two stage refereeing process. ToPNoC contains: Revised versions of a selection of the best papers from workshops and tutorials at the annual Petri net conferences; special sections/issues within particular subareas (similar to those published in the Advances in Petri Nets series); other papers invited for publication in ToPNoC; papers submitted directly to ToPNoC by their authors. This is the first volume of ToPNoC. It contains revised and extended versions of a selection of the best papers from the workshops held at the 28th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency, which took place in Siedlce, Poland, June 25-29, 2007. The material has been selected and evaluated by the two Workshop and Tutorial Chairs, Wil van der Aalst and Jonathan Billington, in close cooperation with the chairs of the individual workshops. The 13 papers in this volume cover a wide range of concurrency-related topics, including: teaching concurrency; process languages; process mining; software engineering; state space visualization techniques; timed Petri nets; unfolding techniques and hardware systems. Thus, this volume gives a good overview of the state of the art in concurrency research.

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, provides students and IT professionals with an in-depth analysis of the cloud from the ground up. After an introduction to network-centric computing and network-centric content in Chapter One, the book is organized into four sections. Section One reviews basic concepts of concurrency and parallel and distributed systems. Section Two presents such critical components of the cloud ecosystem as cloud service providers, cloud access, cloud data storage, and cloud hardware and software. Section Three covers cloud applications and cloud security, while Section Four presents research topics in cloud computing. Specific topics covered include resource virtualization, resource management and scheduling, and advanced topics like the impact of scale on efficiency, cloud scheduling subject to deadlines, alternative cloud architectures, and vehicular clouds. An included glossary covers terms grouped in several categories, from general to services, virtualization, desirable attributes and security. - Includes new chapters on concurrency, cloud hardware and software, challenges posed by big data and mobile applications and advanced topics - Provides a new appendix that presents several cloud computing projects - Presents more than 400 references in the text, including recent research results in several areas related to cloud computing

system is a complex object containing a significant percentage of elec A tronics that interacts with the Real World (physical environments, humans, etc. ) through sensing and actuating devices. A system is heterogeneous, i. e. , is characterized by the co-existence of a large number of components of disparate type and function (for example, programmable components such as micro processors and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), analog components such as AID and D/A converters, sensors, transmitters and receivers). Any approach to system design today must include software concerns to be viable. In fact, it is now common knowledge that more than 70% of the development cost for complex systems such as automotive electronics and communication systems are due to software development. In addition, this percentage is increasing constantly. It has been my take for years that the so-called hardware-software co-design problem is formulated at a too low level to yield significant results in shorten ing design time to the point needed for next generation electronic devices and systems. The level of abstraction has to be raised to the Architecture-Function co-design problem, where Function refers to the operations that the system is supposed to carry out and Architecture is the set of supporting components for that functionality. The supporting components as we said above are heteroge neous and contain almost always programmable components.

This festschrift volume, published in honor of Manfred Nagl on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 30 refereed contributions, that cover graph transformations, software architectures and reengineering, embedded systems engineering, and more.