The major activities of SIGOPS are the support of our principal conferences and publication of a quarterly newsletter, Operating Systems Review. Our uniquely-sponsored conference is SOSP, the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, which is held every two years. We co-sponsor ASPLOS with SIGPLAN and SIGARCH (also every two years), as well as other conferences (e.g., PODC with SIGACT) and workshops.
SOSP is held every other year; the last conference was held in December 1993, so the next will be held this coming year, in December 1995, at Copper Mountain, Colorado. Mark Weiser from Xerox Parc is program chair, with John Bennett of Rice serving as general chair. The program committee met in June and selected 22 papers for publication. All papers have a program committee "shepherd" to ensure high quality. As well, the conference will include a poster session for the first time.
Plans are being made to hold the 1997 SOSP in St. Malo, France; this would be the first SOSP ever held outside of the United States. If the financial details seem in line with normal expenses, we will probably go ahead with this plan.
In the SOSP off-year, the European SIGOPS Workshop is held in Europe. This is a small workshop with usually 50 or so attendees. This past year, the workshop was held in September in Germany.
The ASPLOS conference was held in San Jose, California, in October 1994. Doug Clark of Princeton was Program Chair, Forest Baskett of SGI was General Chair. This was an excellent conference as usual. Planning is underway for the next ASPLOS to be held in 1996 in Boston Susan Eggers of University of Washington is program chair, Bill Dally of MIT is General Chair.
This past year, we co-sponsored a new operating system conference, OSDI -- Operating Systems Design and Implementation -- with USENIX, the major sponsor, and IEEE the other co-sponsor. Because of the relevancy of this conference to our members, we chose to distribute the proceedings to all SIGOPS members as an added benefit. We hope to do this again if it can be arranged. OSDI will be held every two years in the open SOSP slot.
Like other SIGs, SIGOPS continues to decline in membership, however, we are financially very healthy.
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