The traditional world of real-time embedded systems undergoes a continuous evolution towards more and more complex hardware and software architectures, where computing is distributed across a network of interconnected and possibly heterogeneous processing units; soft real-time co-exists with hard real-time, and high level software infrastructures and middleware play an increasingly important role in the overall picture. At the same time, the world of high-end parallel and distributed computing systems and applications, in its continuously evolving declinations in the form of High-Performance Computing, GRID Computing, Service-Oriented and recently Cloud Computing, is generally paying more and more attention to issues related to Quality of Service, predictability of the timing behavior, interactivity, and real-time performance.

Providing real-time guarantees in the distributed computing arena raises a number of challenging scientific and engineering problems that span across a variety of research areas, such as: real-time computing, parallel and distributed systems, software engineering and architectures, fault-tolerance, and virtualization. In the recent years, the efforts to integrate non-functional properties, mainly real-time behavior, in the new computing paradigms have shown out the actual complexity of the problem ahead of us, realizing also the evident need for providing reliability, security, and real-time guarantees.

REACTION aims at providing a forum for presentation and discussion of the contributions and ideas of researchers working on real-time systems and distributed systems for the next-generation applications. The goal is to bring together contributions on both practical and theoretical aspects applied to the integration of real-time support in these new computation paradigms emphasizing aspects of real-time support for flexibility and system dynamics