Happy New Year! Welcome to the January 2008 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems ( TPDS). It is my pleasure to present a brief state of the journal in this issue. We received 425 total papers in 2006: 405 regular papers and 20 special issue (SI) papers. As of 17 October 2007, we have received 382 total papers: 360 regular papers and 22 SI papers for 2007. We expect to reach the same number of regular paper submissions this year as last. However, we are cutting down on special issues to reduce the printing time of papers, which currently averages around 9 months, after a paper is fully accepted.

As you know, it used to take an average of 26 months to publish a paper in TPDS in 2002. We have now cut it down to 18 months, which includes reviews, minor/major revisions, and time to print after a paper is accepted. Most importantly, the average time for first decision on a paper is less than 4 months for all papers handled in 2006 and 2007, which is comparable to conferences in our areas. We are also taking steps to post the accepted papers electronically much ahead of the paper print, which takes time. Preprints are available on the Computer Society Digital Library within one week of the receipt of all publication materials from the authors. I congratulate the Computer Society staff, Associate Editors, and reviewers of TPDS for a job well done. I also thank the authors for sending high quality papers for publication in our journal.

Drs. Rudolf Eigenmann, Antonio Gonzalez, Gyungho Lee, Umakishore Ramachandran, and Rajeev Thakur have completed their terms and retired from the Editorial Board recently. I very much appreciate their time and effort in processing the papers. I also take this opportunity to welcome and introduce a few distinguished researchers to the Editorial Board of TPDS. Drs. Ricardo Bianchini, Dimitrios Gunopulos, John C.S. Lui, Chunming Qiao, Sampath Rangarajan, and Cheng-Zhong Xu are appointed as new Associate Editors. Their short biographies and areas of research are given below. I am confident they will contribute to further enhancing the quality and timeliness of TPDS.

As always, I invite comments and suggestions from authors, reviewers, and readers on how to improve the quality of this transaction. I also seek your help in spreading a word about TPDS to your colleagues. I look forward to hearing from you.

Laxmi N. Bhuyan

Editor-in-Chief

Ricardo Bianchini received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1995. From 1995 until 1999, he was an assistant professor at COPPE Systems Engineering, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is now an associate professor with Rutgers University. Professor Bianchini's current research interests include the performance, manageability, and power consumption of cluster-based server systems. He has published extensively in these areas and has been on the program committee of several conferences and workshops. He received the US National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2003. One of the papers he coauthored, "The MIT Alewife Machine: Architecture and Performance," has been included in the anthology of the first 25 years of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture. Another paper he coauthored, "Adaptive Techniques for Home-Based Software DSMs," was chosen as the best paper of the 13th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High-Performance Computing in 2001. A third paper, "Application Transformations for Energy and Performance-Aware Device Management," was selected as the best student paper of the 11th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques in 2002. Professor Bianchini was the coordinator of the IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing for South America from 1999 until 2004. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.

Dimitrios Gunopulos is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California Riverside. His research is in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery in databases, databases, and algorithms. He has coauthored more than 100 journals, conference papers, and book chapters, and a book. Dr. Gunopulos has held positions at the IBM Almaden Research Center and at the Max-Planck-Institut for Informatics. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Patras, Greece and graduated with MA and PhD degrees from Princeton University. His research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) (including an NSF CAREER award and an ITR award), the DoD, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program, and AT&T. He has served as a PC cochair in ACM SIGKDD 2006 and in IEEE ICDM 2008.

John C.S. Lui is currently the chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). His research interests span both in system and in theory/mathematics. His current research interests are in theoretic/applied topics in data networks, distributed multimedia systems, network security, OS design issues, and mathematical optimization and performance evaluation theory. He received various departmental teaching awards and the CUHK Vice-Chancellor's Exemplary Teaching Award in 2001. He is a corecipient of the IFIP WG 7.3 Performance 2005 and IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2006 Best Student Paper Awards. He served as the TPC cochair of ACM Sigmetrics 2005 and the general cochair of ICNP 2006. He is currently the vice president of the ACM Sigmetircs.

Chunming Qiao is a professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, where he directs the Lab for Advanced Network Design, Analysis, and Research (LANDER), which conducts cutting-edge research work on optical networks, wireless and mobile networks, survivable networks, and TCP/IP technologies. He has published more than 80 and 120 papers in leading technical journals and conference proceedings, respectively. His pioneering research on optical Internet, in particular, the optical burst switching (OBS) paradigm is internationally acclaimed. In addition, his work on integrated cellular and ad hoc relaying systems (iCAR), started in 1999, is recognized as the harbinger for today's push toward the convergence between heterogeneous wireless technologies, and has been featured in Business Week and Wireless Europe, as well as at the Websites of New Scientists and CBC. His research has been funded by a number of US National Science Foundation (NSF) grants including two ITR awards, and by Alcatel, Fujitsu Labs, NEC Labs, Nokia Research, Nortel, Telcordia, Sprint Advanced Technology Lab, and ITRI. Dr. Qiao has given several keynotes, tutorials, and invited talks on the above research topics. He is on the editorial board of several journals and magazines including IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking ( ToN) and has guest-edited several IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications ( JSAC) and ACM/Baltzer's Journal on Mobile Networks and Applications ( MONET) issues. He has chaired and cochaired a dozen international conferences and workshops including IEEE Infocom 2007 (as a vice general chair) and IEEE World of Wireless and Mobile Multimedia (WoWMoM) 2006 (as a cogeneral chair), and currently chairs the IEEE Technical Committee on High Speed Networks (HSN) and also a subcommittee on Integrated Fiber and Wireless Technologies (FiWi), which he founded. Dr. Qiao was a cofounder and CTO for Brilliant Optical Networks LLC, and is consulting for a couple of telecommunications companies. He is currently on leave at Stanford University.

Sampath Rangarajan received the MS degree in electrical and computer engineering in 1987 and the PhD degree in computer science in 1990, both from the University of Texas at Austin. He heads the IP Networking and Distributed Systems Research Department at NEC Laboratories America in Princeton, New Jersey. Previously, he was with the Networking Research Center at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. Prior to that, he was a cofounder and vice president of technology at Ranch Networks, a venture funded startup in the IP networking space. Earlier, he was a researcher in the Systems and Software Research Center at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Before joining Bell Laboratories, he was an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. His research interests span the areas of distributed systems and networking, including server clustering solutions, Web services, fault-tolerance, network gaming, network virtualization, and mobile networking, encompassing 802.11, 3G, and 802.16 technologies. His research spans both the theoretical and practical aspects of various problems with an emphasis on technology transfer/commercialization of technologies that are developed. His is a senior member of the IEEE and has been on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers and ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review. He has also served on the program committees of various conferences in the distributed systems and fault-tolerant computing areas.

Cheng-Zhong Xu received the BS and MS degrees from Nanjing University in 1986 and 1989, respectively, and the PhD degree from the University of Hong Kong in 1993. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Wayne State University (WSU). He is also the director of the Center for Networked Computing Systems at WSU. His research interest includes networked computing systems and applications, in particular, scalable and secure Internet services and architecture, scheduling and resource management in distributed, parallel, and embedded systems, and autonomic systems management for highly reliable computing. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific papers in archival journals and conferences in these areas. He is the author of Scalable and Secure Internet Services and Architecture (Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, 2005) and the leading coauthor of Load Balancing in Parallel Computers: Theory and Practice (Kluwer Academic, 1996). Dr. Xu serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, the Journal of Parallel, Emergent, and Distributed Systems, the Journal of Computers and Applications, and the Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking. He has also guest edited special issues for several other journals on network services and security in distributed systems. He has served a number of international conferences and workshops in various capacities as program chair, general chair, and plenary speaker. He was a recipient of the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching of WSU in 2002 and the Career Development Chair Award in 2003. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.