SIGOPS Annual Report
July 1997 - June 1998
Submitted by: Carla Ellis, SIGOPS Chair
This is the 1998 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 AND WEB SITE
SIGOPS publishes a quarterly newsletter, Operating Systems Review. William Waite (University of Colorado) continues as editor of our newsletter.
Certain conference proceedings are also produced and distributed as additional special issues of OSR.
Mary Baker (Stanford) is our Information Director, responsible for maintaining the SIGOPS web pages at http://www.acm.org/sigops.
SIGOPS has helped to fund special issues of the Transactions On Computer Systems (TOCS) that publish award papers from our sponsored conferences.
SPONSORED CONFERENCES (AND INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVES)
Thirty years ago, the first Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) was held in Gatlinburg TN. Since then, this SIGOPS-sponsored conference has established itself as the premier forum for the operating systems research community. The most recently held SOSP (October 5-8, 1997) was both a very successful and an historic event. This was the first time SOSP had ever been held outside the United States. Despite some of the potential risks of “going international”, the number and quality of submitted papers was up, attendance was average for SOSP (exceeding our conservative budget estimates), student participation was substantial (encouraged, in part, by aggressive travel grant programs), corporate and government support (an NSF grant) was significant, and the site fit the “SOSP character” wonderfully. Congratulations and thanks must go to the organizers, Hank Levy (University of Washington) who was Program Chair and Michel Banatre (IRISA/INRIA) who was General Chair, and to their respective committees. All SIGOPS members received the Proceedings, including a copy of the CD-ROM, as a special issue of Operating Systems Review.
In 1999, SOSP will return to the United States at the Kiawah Island Resort on the coast of South Carolina. Planning for this event is well underway. The Program Chair for the 17th SOSP is John Wilkes (HP-Labs) and the General Chair is David Kotz (Dartmouth College).
The SIGOPS European Workshop will be held September 7-10, 1998 in Sintra Portugal on the topic of “Support for Composing Distributed Applications”. This workshop is being organized by Jean Bacon (University of Cambridge, England) who is Program Chair, and Paulo Guedes (INESC, Portugal) who is General Chair.
ACTIVITIES CO-SPONSORED WITH OTHER SIGs / ORGANIZATIONS
ASPLOS, the Symposium on Architectural Support for Programming Language and Operating Systems (cosponsored with SIGARCH and SIGPLAN), will be held in October 1998 in Santa Clara, CA. This is held every two years and proceedings are always distributed to the SIGOPS membership as an OSR special issue.
PODC, the Symposium on Principle of Distributed Computing (cosponsored with SIGACT), was held June 28-July 2 in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
SIGOPS again will be co-sponsoring OSDI-Operating Systems Design and Implementation- with USENIX, the major sponsor, and IEEE-TCOS, the other co-sponsor. This conference will be held in February 1999.
Because of the relevency of this conference to our members, we distribute the proceedings to all SIGOPS members as a special issue of OSR.
We also co-sponsor the IOPADS workshop (I/O for Parallel and Distributed Systems) and are involved with MOBICOM (SIGMOBILE’s conference).
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES
One of the major concerns expressed about holding SOSP in France was 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 budgeted $20,000 in its FY98 budget for student travel grants for SOSP and received a grant from the National Science Foundation is for a matching $20,000 as well as contributions from IBM explicitly for this purpose.
In addition, the SOSP conference organizers 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 one of the largest SIGs 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 to the SIG Discretionary Fund in FY’98.
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