SIGOPS Annual Report
July, 1995 - June, 1996
Submitted by: Carla Ellis
This is the 1996 annual report for SIGOPS, the Special Interest
Group on Operating Systems. Officers for SIGOPS are Carla Ellis
(Duke University), chair, Marc Shapiro (Inria, France), vice-chair,
and Paul Leach (Microsoft), secretary/treasurer.
PUBLICATIONS
SIGOPS publishes a quarterly newsletter, Operating Systems
Review. William Waite (University of Colorado) the job. We
wish to acknowledge his outstanding volunteer effort.
This year, as a result of a request by Ken Birman, Editor-in-Chief
of the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, we financed the
special issue of TOCS (January 1996) which contains the award
papers from the SIGOPS-sponsored Symposium on Operating Systems
Principles.
CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS
Our flagship biennial conference, the Symposium on Operating
Systems Principles (SOSP), was held for the fifteenth time on
December 4-6, 1995 at Copper Mountain, Colorado. As usual, the
conference proceedings were distributed to the SIGOPS membership as
a special issue of Operating Systems Review. John Bennett
(Rice University) was General Chair and Mark Weiser (Xerox PARC)
was Program Chair. The conference upheld its traditions of
offering a program consisting of a set of meticulously reviewed and
shepherded papers, a Work-In-Progress Session, and the Systers
luncheon. There were also several exciting innovations this year:
a poster session, an extensive web site, on-line access to many of
the accepted papers prior to the conference, a CD ROM of the
proceedings and additional material put together by Andrew Birrell
(DEC SRC), and a greatly expanded program of scholarships to allow
more students to attend the conference.
ACTIVITIES CO-SPONSORED WITH OTHER SIGs / ORGANIZATIONS
At the Federated Conferences, May 1996 in Philadelphia, we
co-sponsored PODC (Principles of Distributed Computing) with SIGACT
and the IOPADS Workshop (I/O for Parallel and Distributed Systems)
with SIGACT, SIGARCH, and IEEE-TCOS. We also co-sponsored several
other workshops during the past year.
The ASPLOS conference (co-sponsored with SIGPLAN and SIGARCH) will
be held October 1-4, 1996,in Cambridge MA. Susan Eggers
(University of Washington) is Program Chair, Bill Dally (MIT) is
General Chair. This is held every two years and proceedings are
distributed to SIGOPS membership.
For the second time, SIGOPS will co-sponsor OSDI -- Operating
Systems Design and Implementation -- with USENIX, the major
sponsor, and IEEE-TCOS, the other co-sponsor. This conference is
scheduled October 28-31, 1996 in Seattle. Because of the relevency
of this conference to our members, we will be distributing the
proceedings to all SIGOPS members as a special issue of OSR. OSDI
will be held every two years in the off-year to SOSP.
INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVES
Plans are being made to hold the 1997 SOSP, October 6-8, in St.
Malo, France; this will be the first SOSP ever held outside of the
United States. Michel Banatre (INRIA, France) will be General
Chair and Hank Levy (University of Washington) will be Program
Chair.
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 coming fall (September 9-11, 1996) the European Workshop will
be held in Ireland with a topic of "Systems Support for Worldwide
Applications". The meeting is being organized by Andrew Herbert
(ANSA, Cambridge England) as General Chair and Andy Tanenbaum
(Vrije University, Holland) as Program Chair.
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES
This year, we continued our scholarship program for travel by
students to SOSP. For the 1997 SOSP, this program will be expanded
to ease the burden of international travel since SOSP will be held
in France.
MEMBERSHIP
Like other SIGs, SIGOPS continues to decline in membership,
however, we are financially very helathy.
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