SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award

The SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award was instituted in 2005 to recognize the most influential Operating Systems papers that have appeared in the peer-reviewed literature at least ten years in the past.

Nominations will be solicited of the SIGOPS membership via email. The Hall of Fame Award Committee will choose which nominated paper wins the award. The decision will be based on a discussion that considers the impact the paper (and more generally of the research described in the paper) has had on the field of operating systems research. The Award committee will prepare a short statement that describes why the paper was selected.

The award winners will be announced at the SOSP or OSDI conference by the current program chair. The program chair will read the statement prepared by the Award committee that describes why the paper was selected. The authors of the award winning paper will be given a plaque, naming the paper, the authors, the conference or journal the paper appeared in, and the conference in which the award was made. This certificate will be signed by the program chair and the current chair of SIGOPS. A list of the winners of the award will be maintained on the SIGOPS website.

To bootstrap the award, up to five awards will be given at SOSP 2005 and SOSP 2007. One award will be given at OSDI 2006 and both conferences thereafter.

The Hall of Fame Award Committee consists of the program chairs from each of the four most recent SOSPs, and one co-chair from each of the four most recent OSDIs, with appropriate substitutions if someone is unable to serve.

Nomination procedure

For 2007, anyone may send nominations via email to HOFnominations@sosp2007.org, on or before Sept. 10, 2007. Please provide the full citation information for the paper being nominated, and a brief statement describing the reasons for the nomination. The Subject line of the email message should include the title of the nominated paper.

2005 Awards

• Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Structure of the THE Multiprogramming System, Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 1967, Gatlinburg, TN, USA.
  The first paper to suggest that an operating system be built in a structured way. That structure was a series of layers, each a virtual machine that introduced abstractions built using the functionality of lower layer. The paper stimulated a great deal of subsequent work in building operating systems as structured systems.
• Peter J. Denning, The Working Set Model for Program Behavior, Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 1967, Gatlinburg, TN, USA.
  This paper introduced the working set model, which has became a key concept in understanding of locality of memory references and for implementing virtual memory. Most paging algorithms can trace their roots back to this work.
• Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson, The UNIX Time-Sharing System, Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 1973, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA.
  At a time when operating systems were trending towards complexity, UNIX emerged as a hallmark of elegance and simplicity.
• Butler Lampson, Hints for Computer System Design, Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 33-48, October 1983, Bretton Woods, NH, USA.
  A classic study of experience building large systems, distilled into a cookbook of wisdom for the operating systems researcher. As time has passed, the value of these hints has only grown and the range of systems to which they apply enlarged.

2006 Awards

• George C. Necula and Peter Lee, Safe Kernel Extensions Without Run-Time Checking, Proceedings of the Second USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, October 1996, Seattle, WA.
  This paper introduced the notion of proof carrying code (PCC) and showed how it could be used for ensuring safe execution by kernel extensions without incurring run-time overhead. PCC turns out to be a general approach for relocating trust in a system; trust is gained in a component by trusting a proof checker (and using it to check a proof the component behaves as expected) rather than trusting the component per se. PCC has become one of the cornerstones of language-based security.

2007 Awards

• Leslie Lamport, Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System, Communications of the ACM 21(7):558-565, July 1978.
  Perhaps the first true "distributed systems" paper, it introduced the concept of "causal ordering", which turned out to be useful in many settings. The paper proposed the mechanism it called "logical clocks", but everyone now calls these "Lamport clocks."
• Andrew D. Birrell and Bruce Jay Nelson, Implementing Remote Procedure Calls, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2(1):39-59, February 1984.
  This is *the* paper on RPC, which has become the standard for remote communication in distributed systems and the Internet. The paper does an excellent job laying out the basic model for RPC and the implementation options.
• J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark, End-To-End Arguments in System Design, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2(4):277-288, November 1984.
  This paper gave system designers, and especially Internet designers, an elegant framework for making sound decisions. A paper that launched a revolution and, ultimately, a religion.
• Michael Burrows, Martin Abadi, and Roger Needham, A Logic of Authentication, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 8(1):18-36, February 1990.
  This paper introduced to the systems community a logic-based notation for authentication protocols to precisely describe certificates, delegations, etc. With this precise description a designer can easily reason whether a protocol is correct or not, and avoid the security flaws that have plagued protocols. "Speaks-for" and "says" are now standard tools for system designers.
• Fred B. Schneider, Implementing Fault-Tolerant Services Using the State Machine Approach: a tutorial, ACM Computing Surveys 22(4):299-319, December 1990.
  The paper that explained how we should think about replication ... a model that turns out to underlie Paxos, Virtual Synchrony, Byzantine replication, and even Transactional 1-Copy Serializability.