SIGOPS Annual Report
July 1996 - June 1997
Submitted by: Carla Ellis, SIGOPS Chair
This is the 1997 annual report for SIGOPS, the Special Interest Group on Operating Systems. This will be our 30th Anniversary. Officers for SIGOPS are Carla Ellis (Duke University), chair, Marc Shapiro (Inria, France), vice-chair, and Paul Leach (Microsoft), secretary/treasurer. SIGOPS underwent a very successful review by the ACM SIG Board in October, 1996.
PUBLICATIONS AND WEB SITE
SIGOPS publishes a quarterly newsletter, Operating Systems Review. William Waite (University of Colorado) continues as editor of our newsletter.
Mary Baker (Stanford) was recently appointed Information Director to design and maintain the SIGOPS web pages at www.acm.org/.
SIGOPS helps to fund special issues of the Transactions On Computer Systems (TOCS) that publish award papers from our sponsored conferences.
SPONSORED CONFERENCES (AND INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVES)
Last fall (September 9-11, 1996) the European SIGOPS Workshop was held in Ireland with a topic of "Systems Support for Worldwide Applications". The meeting was organized by Andrew Herbert (ANSA, Cambridge England) as General Chair and Andy Tanenbaum (Vrije University, Holland) as Program Chair. The program consisted of 21 papers and panel discussions.
Our flagship biennial conference, the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), will be held for the 16th time October 6-8, 1997 in St. Malo, France. This will be the first SOSP ever held outside of the United States, even though there is a significant OS research community in Europe which has always been actively involved in SIGOPS and SOSP. Michel Banatre (INRIA, France) is General Chair and Hank Levy (University of Washington) is Program Chair. The conference will offer a program of 23 meticulously reviewed and shepherded papers, an invited keynote address by Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame), a combined Work-In-Progress and Poster Session, an extensive web site (http://sosp16.irisa.fr/, mirrored at http://www.cs.washington.edu/sosp16/), a greatly expanded program of scholarships to ease the burden of international travel and allow more students to attend the conference, and a CD ROM of the proceedings.
ACTIVITIES CO-SPONSORED WITH OTHER SIGs / ORGANIZATIONS
The ASPLOS conference (co-sponsored with SIGPLAN and SIGARCH) was held October 1-4, 1996,in Cambridge MA. Susan Eggers (University of Washington) was Program Chair, Bill Dally (MIT) was General Chair. This is held every two years and proceedings are distributed to SIGOPS membership.
For the second time, SIGOPS co-sponsored OSDI -- Operating Systems Design and Implementation --with USENIX, the major sponsor, and IEEE-TCOS, the other co-sponsor. This conference was held October 28-31, 1996 in Seattle. Because of the relevancy of this conference to our members, we distributed the proceedings to all SIGOPS members as a special issue of OSR.
The Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '97), co-sponsored with SIGACT will be held August 21-24 1997 in Santa Barbara, California. Amir Pnueli will give his A. M. Turing award lecture at PODC '97.
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES
One of the major concerns expressed about holding SOSP in France has been the financial burden it would place on students wishing to attend the conference. Since SOSP is held only every other year, it is an especially important opportunity that should not be limited to just those completing degrees in that academic year. SIGOPS has budgeted $20,000 in its FY98 budget for student travel grants for SOSP and a proposal to the National Science Foundation is pending for a matching $20,000. In addition, the SOSP conference organizers have received funding from several European sponsors to support attendance by European students.
MEMBERSHIP AND BUDGET
Like other SIGs, SIGOPS continues to decline in membership, however, we are financially very healthy. SIGOPS is the 5th largest SIG with one of the better retention rates. We have a substantial fund balance that we can use to support special initiatives and services for the membership. SIGOPS contributed $3000 to the SIG Discretionary Fund in FY’97. This funded projects approved by all the SIG Chairs.
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