22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

October 11-14, 2009

Big Sky Resort
Big Sky, MT

ACM SIGOPS In Cooperation with USENIX
Follow sosp09 on Twitter

General Chair Jeanna Neefe Matthews, Clarkson University jnm@clarkson.edu
Program Chair Thomas Anderson, University of Washington tom@cs.washington.edu

Sponsored by ACM SIGOPS

Authors are invited to submit papers to the 22nd SOSP reporting on original research related to the design, implementation, analysis, evaluation, and deployment of computer systems software. SOSP takes a broad view of the systems area and solicits contributions from many fields of systems practice, including, but not limited to, operating systems, file and storage systems, distributed systems, mobility, security, embedded systems, fault tolerance, system management, peer to peer systems, and virtualization. We also welcome work that explores the interface to related areas such as computer architecture, networking, programming languages and databases. In keeping with SOSP tradition, we will favor work that explores new territory, continues a significant research dialog, or reflects on experience with or measurements of state of the art implementations. Papers of particular merit will be forwarded to ACM Transactions on Computer Systems for possible publication in a special issue.

A good paper will demonstrate that the authors:

Submissions will be judged on originality, significance, interest, clarity, relevance, and correctness. In addition to citing relevant, published work, authors should relate their SOSP submissions to relevant submissions of their own that are simultaneously under review for this or other venues. The SOSP PC reserves the right to ask authors to provide copies of related simultaneously-submitted papers.

Submissions will be done electronically. Detailed instructions for the submission process can be found on the conference Web site, www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09. Submitted papers must be no longer than fourteen (14) 8.5"x11" or A4 pages, using a 10 point font on 12 point (single spaced) leading, with a maximum text block of 6.5 inches wide by 9 inches deep. The page limit includes everything: references, title page, figures, appendices, etc. Authors must make a good faith effort to anonymize their submissions, and they should not identify themselves either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through the references or acknowledgments). Submissions violating the detailed formatting and anonymization rules on the Web site will not be considered for publication. There will be no extensions for reformatting.

Blind reviewing of full papers will be done by the program committee, with limited use of outside referees. Papers will be provisionally accepted subject to revision and approval by a program committee member acting as a shepherd. On acceptance, authors will be required to sign an ACM copyright release form. Your submission indicates that you agree to this. Papers will be held in full confidence during the reviewing process, but papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms are not acceptable and will be rejected without review. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to supply electronic versions of their papers and encouraged to supply source code and raw data to help others replicate and better understand their results.

Blind reviewing is not intended to inhibit the exchange of early research results. Authors are invited, but not required, to publish a deanonymized version of their paper to a web site for public comment during the review period. Authors are also invited, but not required, to submit their work for review by "shadow" program committees consisting of faculty and students. Faculty wishing to chair a shadow program committee should contact the program chair on or before the deadline for registering abstracts; comments from shadow PC reviewers will be returned to authors by the notification date.

There will be a scholarship program to support student registration and attendance. Details will be posted on the Web site.

Affiliated Workshops

SOSP 2009 will officially host workshops at the Big Sky venue. The purpose of these workshops is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and preliminary results of topics related to SOSP in an interactive environment. We invite proposals for "open" workshops with the intent to draw upon the collective experience, interests and opinions of all SOSP attendees. See the SOSP 2009 web site for further details.

Important Dates

Deadline to register abstracts | Submission Rules March 2, 2009, 11:59 PM, PST
Submission deadline (HARD, NO EXTENSIONS) March 9, 2009, 11:59 PM, PDT
Acceptance notification June 15, 2009
Camera-ready deadline (HARD, NO EXTENSIONS) Aug 3, 2009
First Round student scholarship applications deadline August 15, 2009
WIP and Poster abstracts due August 17, 2009
Early registration deadline September 1, 2009

Program Committee

Lorenzo Alvisi, Univ. Texas-Austin
David Andersen, Carnegie-Mellon
Tom Anderson, Univ. Washington
Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Wisconsin
Paul Barham, MSR Cambridge
Herbert Bos, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Mike Burrows, Google
Miguel Castro, MSR Cambridge
Jeff Chase, Duke
Peter Chen, Univ. Michigan
Jon Crowcroft, Cambridge University
Mike Dahlin, Univ. Texas-Austin
Jeff Dean, Google
Mike Freedman, Princeton
Hermann Härtig, Dresden
Steven Hand, Cambridge University
Norm Hutchinson, Univ. British Columbia
Arvind Krishnamurthy, Univ. Washington
Max Krohn, Yale
Philip Levis, Stanford
Jeff Mogul, HP Labs
Andrew Myers, Cornell
John Ousterhout, Stanford
Sylvia Ratnasamy, Intel Berkeley
Timothy Roscoe, ETH Zurich
Stefan Savage, UCSD
Srini Seshan, Carnegie-Mellon
Gun Sirer, Cornell
Mike Swift, Wisconsin
Helen Wang, MSR Redmond
Nickolai Zeldovich, MIT
Yuanyuan Zhou, UIUC
Zheng Zhang, MSR Asia

Conference Organizers

General Chair Jeanna Neefe Matthews, Clarkson University
Treasurer Geoff Kuenning, Harvey Mudd College
Sponsorship Chair Sharon Weber, VMware
Workshop Chair Marc Fiuczynski, Princeton University
Publicity Dilma da Silva, IBM
Registration Jacob R. Lorch, Microsoft
Birds-of-a-Feather Organizer Christopher Small, BBN Technologies
Scholarship Chair Yvonne Coady, University of Victoria
WIP Chair Mike Dahlin, University of Texas at Austin
Poster Session Chair Mike Swift, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Webmaster Todd Deshane, Clarkson University

Submission Rules

Submissions violating the formatting and anonymization rules will not be considered for publication. There will be no extensions for reformatting.

The instructions are similar in spirit to ones used for other conferences with double-blind reviewing (submissions and reviews are anonymous). If you have any questions, feel free to send email to tom @ cs.washington.edu.

Good luck with your submission!

Formatting rules

Submitted papers must be no longer than fourteen (14) 8.5"x11" pages, using a 10 point font on 12 point (single spaced) leading, with a maximum text block of 6.5 inches wide by 9 inches deep. The page limit includes everything: references, title page, figures, appendices, etc. Please take note of the following:

  • Submissions should be anonymous. On the front page, in place of the authors' names, the paper should indicate: the paper ID number assigned during the paper registration process and the total number of pages in the submission.
  • Pages should be numbered. (For the submission, you may be better off not using the SIG template; just use the standard latex "article" format in 10, or larger, point double column, so that pages are numbered.)
  • The paper should print well on black-and-white printers, not color printers. This is especially true for plots and graphs in the paper.
  • The output should be formatted for printing on LETTER (8.5" x 11") size paper, with 10-point font and 12-point spacing. All material (except page numbers) should be in a 6.5" by 9" block on each page. The block should be formatted with two columns, with 0.25" separation between the two columns.
  • Symbols and labels used in the graphs should be readable as printed, and not only with a 20x on-screen magnification.
  • Try to limit the file size to less than 15 MB.

Anonymizing rules

Please make a good faith effort to anonymize your paper. As an author, you should not identify yourself in the paper either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through the references or acknowledgments). However, only non-destructive anonymization is required. For example, system names may be left un-anonymized, if the system name is important for a reviewer to be able to evaluate the work. For example, a paper on experiences with the design of .NET should not be re-written to be about "an anonymous but widely used commercial distributed systems platform".

Additionally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

  • Remove authors' names and affiliations from the title page.
  • Remove acknowledgement of identifying names and funding sources.
  • Use care in naming your files. Source file names, e.g., Joe.Smith.dvi, are often embedded in the final output as readily accessible comments.
  • Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, a good solution is to reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work.
  • If you have a concurrent submission, reference it as follows: "Closely related work describes a microkernel implementation [Anonymous 2007]." with the corresponding citation: "[Anonymous 2007] Under submission. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing."
  • If you cite anonymous work, you must also send the deanonymized reference(s) to the chair in separate email.

We recognize that, even following these guidelines, closely building on your own prior work may indirectly reveal your identity.

Writing advice

Lots of papers and books have been written about how to write a good paper. We strongly suggest that you read the following:

  • An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions; or, How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper.
    This was written by Roy Levin and David D. Redell, the program committee co-chairs for SOSP-9, and first appeared in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July, 1983), pages 35-40.
  • The Science of Scientific Writing, George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan, In American Scientist, Vol. 78, No. 6 (Nov-Dec, 1990), pp. 550-558.
    This article describes not how to write an entire paper, but how to write sentences and paragraphs that readers can understand.

For matters of English usage, style, and taste we strongly recommend that you purchase and consult this little gem of a book:

  • The Elements of Style. William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1979.