The Dennis M. Ritchie Award

Nomination Deadline: August 15th ,2024

The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created in 2013 by ACM SIGOPS to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research. This is an annual award presented at SOSP.

Call for Nominations

Eligibility

Each year, a department is allowed to nominate one Ph.D. thesis produced in that department. The nomination must be made by the chair of the department and must be accompanied by three supporting letters from researchers in the field, clearly specifying the contributions of the thesis and the potential impact on software systems. (If the department chair is the thesis advisor of the nominee, then another senior faculty member in the department must make the nomination.) The thesis must have been defended successfully at most two years before the conference at which the award will be presented. An English-language version of the thesis must accompany the nomination. The Award Committee will determine if the thesis is within scope for the award. The thesis may be nominated simultaneously for other awards, such as the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Award

The SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award is accompanied by a prize of $2,000.

Submission Procedure

Each nomination packet should be emailed by the department chair to the award committee at dmr-award@acm.org. In the subject title of the email, please write “SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation submission for (nominee name).” Submissions should be sent bundled in one zipped file.

A nomination packet MUST include:

• • Nomination letter by the department chair or senior faculty member. This letter must include a one-page summary of the significance of the dissertation.

• • Three or more endorsement letters from researchers in the field, at least two of which must come from institutions other than the nominating one.

• • A copy of the thesis.

• Information on when and where the thesis was defended.

Steering committee

• Robbert van Renesse
• Nickolai Zeldovich
• Shan Lu

Winners

2024:
Konstantinos Kallas (winner)
University of Pennsylvania
Advisor: Rajeev Alur
Just-in-Time Scale-Out of Shell Programs, Correctly

Fan Lai (Honorable Mention)
University of Michigan
Advisor: Mosharaf Chowdhury
Minimalist Systems for Pervasive Machine Learning

2023:
Rishabh Iyer (winner)
EPFL
Advisors: George Candea and Katerina Argyraki
Latency Interfaces for Systems Code

Chang Lou (Honorable Mention)
Johns Hopkins University
Advisors: Ryan (Peng) Huang
Enhancing Cloud System Runtime to Address Complex Failures

2022:
Yongle Zhang (winner)
University of Toronto
Advisor: Ding Yuan
Automating Failure Diagnosis for Distributed Systems

Tej Chajed (honorable mention)
MIT
Advisors: Frans Kaashoek and Nickolai Zeldovich.
Verifying a concurrent, crash-safe file system with sequential reasoning

Akshitha Sriraman (honorable mention)
University of Michigan
Advisor: Thomas Wenisch
Enabling Hyperscale Web Services

2021:
Marios Kogias (winner)
EPFL
Advisor: Edouard Bugnion
Operating System and Network Co-design for Latency-Critical Datacenter Applications

Oana Balmau (honorable mention)
University of Sydney
Advisor: Willy Zwaenepoel
Redesigning Persistent Key-Value Stores for Future Workloads, Hardware, and Performance Requirements

Xingda Wei (honorable mention)
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Advised by Binyu Zang, Rong Chen, and Haibo Chen
Fast Distributed Transaction Processing using RDMA and NVM

2020:
Natacha Crooks (winner)
Advisors: Lorenzo Alvisi and Simon Peter, University of Texas, Austin.
A Client-Centric Approach to Transactional Datastores

Anuj Kalia (Honorable Mention)
Advisor: David G. Andersen, Carnegie Mellon University.
Efficient Remote Procedure Calls for Datacenters

2019:
Sebastian Angel (winner),
Advisor: Michael Walfish, University of Texas, Austin
Unobservable communications over untrusted infrastructure

2018:
Irene Zhang (Winner),
Advisors: Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy, University of Washington
Towards a Flexible, High-Performance Operating System for Mobile/Cloud Applications

2016:
Vijay Chidambaram (Winner),
Advisor: Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin–Madison
“Orderless and Eventually Durable File Systems”

Charles M. Curtsinger (Honorable Mention),
Advisor: Emery D. Berger, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
“Performance Analysis and Debugging”

2015:
Cristiano Giuffrida (Winner),
Advisor: Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Vrije University, Netherlands
“Safe and Automatic Live Update”

Nadav Amit (Honorable Mention),
Advisors: Assaf Schuster and Dan Tsafrir, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology
“Alleviating Virtualization Bottlenecks”

2014:
Austin T. Clements (Winner),
Advisor: M. Frans Kaashoek, Nickolai Zeldovich, MIT
“The Scalable Commutativity Rule: Designing Scalable Software for Multicore Processors”

John Criswell (Honorable Mention),
Advisor: Vikram Adve, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Secure Virtual Architecture: Security for Commodity Software Systems”

2013:
Mona Attariyan (Winner),
Advisor: Jason Flinn, University of Michigan
“Improving Software Configuration Troubleshooting with Causality Analysis”

Roxana Geambasu (Honorable Mention),
Advisor: Steven D. Gribble, Tadayoshi Kohno, Henry M. Levy, University of Washington
“Empowering Users with Control over Cloud and Mobile Data”