The Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), our flagship
conference, was held at the beautiful Chateau Lake Louise in Banff,
Canada, last October. The participants seemed as impressed by the
excellent technical program as they were by the scenery. One of the
highlights of the program was the presentation of two awards. We gave
a Distinguished service award to Bill Waite, who edited Operating
Systems Review for well for over twenty years. The Mark Weiser award,
given each year "to an individual who has demonstrated creativity and
innovation in operating systems research" (and must have begun his or
her career no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination), was
inaugurated at this SOSP. Frans Kaashoek of MIT was first to receive
the award. Future awards will be presented at OSDI and SOSP each
year.
Two award papers were the highlights of the excellent SOSP program: "Untrusted Hosts and Confidentiality: Secure Program Partitioning" by Steve Zdancewic, Lantian Zheng, Nathaniel Nystrom, Andrew C. Myers (Cornell University), and "BASE: Using Abstraction to Improve Fault Tolerance" by Rodrigo Rodrigues, Barbara Liskov (MIT), Miguel Castro (Microsoft Research).
SIGOPS also co-sponsored the 20th ACM Symposium on Principles of
Distributed Computing (PODC), in August, and the 9th
International Conference on Architectural Support for
Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), in November.
Middleware (the IFIP/ACM International Conference on
Distributed System Platforms) was once again "in cooperation with
SIGOPS", in November.
In the coming year we see the return of our biannual European
Workshop, to be held in Saint-Emilion, France, in September, and will
co-sponsor OSDI (Operating Systems Design and Implementation), in
December. Once again, WIESS (Workshop on Industrial Experiences with
System Software) will be colocated with OSDI.
We are also involved in several new conferences. We lent our
cooperation to two new conferences, FAST (Conference on File and
Storage Technologies), last January, and ARCS (Trends in network and
pervasive computing), in April, and to MobiSys (the International
Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services) coming to
San Francisco next May.
At the SIGOPS business meeting last year we had a long discussion
about the location for future SOSP meetings. We held SOSP in Europe
for the first time in 1997, and there is general support to return to
Europe on a regular basis, perhaps every three iterations or so. On
the other hand, the SOSP audience has substantial overlap with the
SIGCOMM audience; SIGCOMM's annual conference meets in Europe every
three years. Several who like to attend both SOSP and SIGCOMM voiced
a preference to avoid scheduling both in Europe in the same year.
Since SIGCOMM's rotation places them in Europe in 2003, we decided to
postpone SOSP's return to Europe until SOSP'05. SOSP'03 will be at
the beautiful Sagamore resort on Lake George (north of Albany, NY),
October 19-22, 2003. Michael Scott is General Chair, and Larry
Peterson is Program Chair.
We continue to communicate to our membership through the Operating
Systems Review newsletter and the monthly email to the SIGOPS-announce
mailing list. We continually strive to serve our community and our
members well. The number of members is, however, decreasing.
Although our conferences are well attended, and the research community
is thriving, we find that fewer members of that community choose to
become SIGOPS members. We encourage all systems researchers to
continue support our community and to join SIGOPS.
The SIGOPS community is as vital as ever. Despite the "operating systems" in our name, we continue to involve people who are interested in a wide range of systems issues, as exhibited by the content in the conferences listed above. In addition to core topics in operating systems, our community's interests span distributed systems, networks and the Internet, middleware, pervasive computing, security, mobile computing, multimedia systems, and more. Some areas that seem to be of rapidly increasing interest are pervasive computing, power management, sensor networks, security, scalable Internet services, peer-to-peer storage, and overlay networks.