Pre-Announcement and Call for Papers

Second Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '96)

October 28 - Oct 31, 1996

Seattle, Washington, USA

Sponsored by the USENIX Association

Co-sponsored by IEEE TCOS and ACM SIGOPS

After a successful first OSDI symposium, the next OSDI will continue to focus on practical issues related to modern operating systems. OSDI brings together professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds, and has become the perfect forum for issues concerning the design and implementation of operating systems for modern computing platforms such as workstations, parallel architectures, mobile computers, and high speed networks.

The OSDI symposium emphasizes both innovative research and quantified experience in operating systems. We seek papers describing original work concerning the design, implementation and use of modern operating systems. Besides mature work, we encourage submissions describing exceptionally promising well-grounded speculative work, or enlightening negative results. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

OS structure and organization OS kernel internals, servers and applications
Distributed and mobile computing Multiprocessor and parallel systems
Communications Storage Management and I/O systems
Security in distributed systems Scalability and availability
Heterogeneous systems Performance and optimizations
Language support for OS OS interaction with HW architecture
OS support for embedded systems OS support for real time and multimedia
Interaction of OS and applications

Program Committee

Karin Petersen, Xerox PARC (co-Chair) Willy Zwaenepoel, Rice Univ. (co-Chair)
Peter Chen, Univ. of Michigan Richard Draves, Microsoft Research
Carla Ellis, Duke Univ. Ed Felten, Princeton Univ.
Jim Gray, Microsoft Bay Area Lab. Kevin Jeffay, Univ. of North Carolina
David Johnson, CMU Jay Lepreau, Univ. of Utah
Jeff Mogul, DEC WRL Marc Shapiro, INRIA
John Wilkes, HP Labs John Zahorjan, Univ. of Washington

Important Dates

Full papers due: May 7, 1996
Notification to authors: July 30, 1996
Revised papers due for shepherding: August 19, 1996
Camera-ready full papers due: September 16, 1996

Submission Process

Authors are required to submit full papers by May 7, 1996. Submitted papers should be no longer than 14 pages, spaced no closer than standard 10 point font on 12 point baseline, single- or double-column format. Longer submissions will be discarded without review. Very similar papers must not have been published or submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be held in the highest confidentiality prior to publication. Papers accompanied by so-called ``non-disclosure agreement'' forms are not acceptable and will be returned unread.

The papers will be judged on significance, originality, clarity, relevance, and correctness. The committee will favor papers with reproducible results, especially those supplying detailed data and explanations, or offering to make data sets or source code available. Accepted papers will be shepherded through an editorial review process by a member of the program committee.

Authors of accepted papers will be expected to provide an HTML page containing the abstract and links to their paper, slides, and software, if available. This will be collected after the event for inclusion in an electronic version of the symposium (for an example, see https://www.cs.utah.edu/~lepreau/osdi94/).

Best Paper Awards

Awards will be given for the best paper and best paper by a full-time student at the conference.

Where to submit

Submission of all papers must be made in both paper and electronic form. Fifteen (15) paper copies (double sided if possible) of the paper must be sent to: 

  Willy Zwaenepoel
  Department of Computer Science
  Rice University 
  6100 S. Main St.
  Houston, TX 77005, USA
and one electronic copy in Postscript (not ASCII) must be submitted by electronic mail to: 
  osdi-papers@cs.rice.edu

For administrative reasons (not blind reviewing), every submission (in both its paper and electronic form) should include one additional page containing: (i) paper title and authors, indicating any who are full time students, and (ii) for the author who will act as the contact to the program committee, his or her name, paper mail address, daytime and evening phone numbers, e-mail address and fax number, if available. The cover sheet mailed with the electronic paper submission should be in ASCII to facilitate accurate on-line book keeping and should be included in the same electronic mail message as the PostScript file containing the paper.

For more details on the submission process authors are encouraged to consult https://sandbox.xerox.com/osdi-96.

All submissions will be acknowledged by May 21, 1996. If your submission is not acknowledged by this date please contact the program chairs promptly at osdi@cs.rice.edu.

Symposium Overview

The symposium will consist of one day of tutorials, followed by 2.5 days of single-track technical sessions with presentations of the refereed papers, and a half day workshop on a topic yet to be determined. One of the technical sessions will be dedicated to work-in-progress presentations and will be described in later announcements. The refereed papers will be published in the Proceedings, provided free to technical session attendees and available for purchase from USENIX. The Proceedings may also be distributed to ACM SIGOPS members. Papers of particular merit will be selected to receive an award and will be published in the IEEE TCOS Bulletin.

Registration Materials

Materials containing all details of the technical and tutorial programs, registration fees and forms, and hotel information will be mailed in August 1996. If you wish to receive the registration materials, please contact:

USENIX Conference Office 22672 Lambert Street, Suite 613, Lake Forest, CA 92630, USA; Phone: 714-588-8649; Fax: 714-588-9706 Internet: conference@usenix.org