SIGOPS ANNOUNCE monthly posting (11/04/2014)

WWW 2015 (PWM)

NEW THIS MONTH!

WWW 2015

ASPLOS ACM SRC 2015

ACM SIGMETRICS 2015

NVMW 2015

VEE 2015

NEW THIS MONTH!

SustainIT 2015

NEW THIS MONTH!

IWCA'14

MidDep 2014

ACM e-Energy 2015

NEW THIS MONTH!

USENIX ATC 2015

NEW THIS MONTH!

USENIX ATC PTT 2015

ICMC 2015

NEW THIS MONTH!

MMSys 2015

===================================================================
Call for Feedback: SIGOPS Hall of Fame Awards Selection Procedure
Revisions
===================================================================

At the request of the SIGOPS chair, Jeanna Matthews, a group of us have been 
meeting to consider revisions to the selection procedures for the SIGOPS Hall 
of Fame Awards.

The Hall of Fame Awards were originally envisioned to serve two purposes.  
The first was to recognize papers from the long history of operating systems 
research that have had proven to have widespread impact, considering only papers
that have appeared at least ten years earlier.  The second was to encourage new
authors to aim higher -- to target work that will be seen in the future as 
having had widespread impact.  The selection process was designed to work in 
two stages: starting in a catch-up mode where up to five papers were selected 
per year, and then in steady state, where one to two newly eligible papers would
be chosen.

We have been more successful at the first goal than the second.  Since the 
selection process started in 2005, 34 truly impressive papers have been selected
for the HoF.  However, the median age of a paper at selection has been 25 years,
and only 5 papers published after 1990 have been selected.  Frustratingly, the 
rate of selection of newer papers has not improved; steady state still seems 
very far off.   This is despite the fact that the selected papers were, with few
exceptions, seen as having wide impact within ten years of publication.  
The current procedures also pose difficulties with sustainability of the 
selection process, procedural transparency, and conflict of interest management.

We propose the following modifications to the process:

1) In time for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of 
SIGOPS at SOSP 2015, we propose to complete the selection of the most 
influential papers of the past fifty years of operating systems research.  
The existing Hall of Fame papers provide a great foundation. In essence, 
we want to complete the catch-up mode over the next year.   
We envision the selection being done by a specially-formed program committee 
with two program co-chairs selected by the SIGOPS chair, with a published CFP, 
public nomination process, and standard conflict of interest rules. 
The intention is that the catchup process will cover papers published through 
SOSP 2005, and that nominations can be made by any SIGOPS member, including 
members of the PC.

2) To give us time to complete the catch-up process and to reduce duplicate 
work, we intend to suspend the selection of further papers to the Hall of Fame 
until the program committee can meet.  In particular, we do not intend to 
announce any new HoF awards at OSDI 2014.

3) Starting with OSDI 2016, we propose to select 1-2 papers annually, restricted
to papers that appeared 10-11 years previously – specifically, between 1st 
October in year (X-11) and 30th Sept in year (X-9). The selection committee for
these awards will be made up of the program chairs / co-chairs of the SOSP/OSDI
conferences which were held within that 10-11 year timeframe.

4) We propose the appointment of a small standing steering committee to advise 
the SIGOPS chair on the Hall of Fame selection and to provide process 
continuity.


Tom Anderson, Peter Druschel, Steve Hand, Jeanna Matthews, Jeff Mogul, Amin Vahdat

(Feedback can be sent to any one of the people above)

===================================================================
Call for Proposals: Availability of 1000 Nodes for Systems Research
Experiments
===================================================================

NSF's PRObE (www.nmc-probe.org) operates four clusters to support
systems research at scale.  The largest is Kodiak
(https://www.nmc-probe.org/wiki/Machines:Kodiak), which is 1000 nodes
(two core x86, 8GB DRAM, two 1TB disks, 1GE and 8Gbps IB) donated by
Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Today Kodiak is hosting researchers from Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon
and Los Alamos.  Princeton researchers have published results from
Kodiak at the most recent NSDI (Wyatt Lloyd, "Stronger Semantics for
Low-Latency Geo-Replicated Storage", NSDI 2013).  On PRObE staging
clusters are researchers from U Central Florida, UT Austin, Georgia
Tech and Carnegie Mellon.

PRObE resources are intended for (infrastructure) systems researchers
committed to public release of their research results, typically
publishing in distributed systems (eg. OSDI or SOSP), cloud computing
(e.g. SOCC), supercomputing (e.g. SC or HPDC), storage (e.g. FAST), or
networking (e.g. NSDI).

PRObE resources are managed by Emulab (www.emulab.org) a cluster
manager for allocating physical nodes that has been in use for systems
research for over a decade (Brian White, "An Experimental Environment
for Distributed Systems and Networks," OSDI 2002).  Users start by
porting and demonstrating their code on a 100-node staging cluster
such as Denali built from the same equipment donation from Los Alamos.
With demonstrated success on a staging cluster, and a compelling
research goal, Kodiak can be requested and allocated, possibly
exclusively, for hours to days.

To start using PRObE resources:
- visit www.nmc-probe.org to learn about the resources
- visit portal.nmc-probe.org to request a PRObE-specific Emulab
  account
- have a research leader or faculty member get an account and define a
  project on portal.nmc-probe.org
- use Portal to get onto Denali, to allocate a single node experiment,
  login into that node to customize and resave the OS image for your
  project, then launch a multi-node experiment to demonstrate your
  system at less than 100 node scale
- use https://www.nmc-probe.org/request/ to request a large allocation
  on Kodiak (this is a HotCRP paper review web site, where your paper
  is a short justification for your research, your preparedness for
  using Kodiak, and your credientials and appropriateness for using
  NSF resources)
- PRObE managers will review, approve and schedule your use of large
  allocations of Kodiak time

In a matter of weeks another style of large PRObE resource will come
online.  Susitna is 34 nodes of 64 core x86 processors, for a total of
more than 2000 x86 cores.  Susitna also has NVidia donated K20 GPU
coprocessors with 2496 cuda cores each, for a total of 84,864 cuda
cores.  With 128 GB DRAM, a hard disk and an SSD each, Susitna nodes
are interconnected by 40Gbps ethernet, 40 Gbps infiniband and 1Gbps
ethernet.

NSF PRObE resources will be available for at least the next two years.

All uses of PRObE resources are obligated to publish their results,
either in conferences or one their web sites, and acknowledge NSF
PRObE resources used in these publications.

See also our PRObE introduction article in the June 2013 USENIX
;login: vol 38, no 3, 2013
(www.cs.cmu.edu/~garth/papers/07_gibson_036-039_final.pdf).

=================================================================
The EuroSys jobs page: A resource for the whole systems community
=================================================================

If you are searching for a position in the Systems area, take a look
at http://jobs.eurosys.org/ New announcements are posted every day, in
several categories: internships, PhD grants and doctoral programs,
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If you want to advertise for systems people, go to
http://jobs.eurosys.org/, and click on the appropriate "Advertise" link.
YOu will be asked to fill in a small form, with a 10-word description
of the job offer, the URL of your lab and the URL of a more detailed
advertisement.

The EuroSys jobs page gets around 10,000 hits a month.