The SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (HoF) was instituted in 2005 to recognize the most influential Operating Systems papers that were published at least ten years in the past. The selection committee consisted of Brian Bershad, Frans Kaashoek, and Jeff Mogul.
The following two papers were selected to receive the HoF Awards for 2017.
Mike Burrows
For his paper:
The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems.
In Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2006), 335-350.
The Chubby lock service provides coarse-grained locking and reliable, low-volume storage for a loosely-coupled distributed system, and is particularly useful for synchronizing activities between clients. Chubby uses Paxos internally, but exposes a lock-service API to its clients, intended to simplify its adoption by programmers. The paper was one of the first to discuss the challenges of engineering a high-availability service for use by a wide range of programmers in a globally-distributed environment. While Chubby itself is widely used only within Google, the paper inspired open-source implementations of similar services, such as Zookeeper, that provide similar functionality.
Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall, and Werner Vogels
For their paper:
Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store.
In Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2007), 205-220.
Dynamo is a scalable and highly reliable distributed key-value store. The paper describes how Dynamo manages the tradeoffs between availability, consistency, cost-effectiveness, and performance, and explains how the system combines a variety of techniques: consistent hashing, vector clocks, sloppy quorums, Merkle trees, and gossip-based membership and failure detection protocols. In particular, the paper emphasizes the value of supporting eventual consistency in order to provide high availability in a distributed system. Dynamo evolved within Amazon to become the basis of a popular cloud service, and also inspired open-source systems such as Cassandra.
The awards were announced at the SOSP 2017 banquet and awards session on Monday, October 30, 2017 in Shanghai, China.