IEEE Internet Computing CFP: Special issue on Web-Scale Data Centers Final submissions due: 1 November 2013 Publication issue: July/August 2014 Please email the guest editors a brief description of the article you plan to submit by 15 October 2013 Guest Editors: Fred Douglis and Pankaj Mehra (ic4-2014@computer.org). Data centers are the "nerve centers" of the Internet. All large-scale Internet services rely on the ability to process enormous amounts of data blindingly quickly, with essentially no downtime. This requires enormous scale, geographic distribution and redundancy, finely tuned systems and networks, and many other features. As many IT consumers virtualize their computing environments and share resources hosted by large-scale cloud service providers, data centers take various roles, supporting both single, large organizations (such as Google or Facebook) and shared tenancy (such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service). Web-scale data centers face numerous challenges, especially including performance, reliability, and security. This special issue encourages submissions from both academic and industrial practitioners, especially as they pertain to open-source tools or products. Topics include: - infrastructure support to provide responsive performance at Web scale - workload characterization and performance analysis of Web-scale data stores - open software for cloud computing - Web-scale service orchestration and multi-tenancy - service architecture issues - software-defined networking, storage, and data centers - stacks for handling petabytes and more - evolution of data center designs - environmental issues of Web-scale data centers (such as cooling and energy consumption) - data center operations - data center security - novel applications of and support for big data technologies such as Hadoop. Editors' note: We want to emphasize that contributions for this special issue should have technical content.