The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created in 2013 by ACM SIGOPS to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research.
The Award committee for 2021 consists of Emery Berger, Angela Demke Brown, and Arvind Krishnamurthy.
for his dissertation
Operating System and Network Co-design for Latency-Critical Datacenter Applications
at
EPFL, Switzerland
advised by Edouard Bugnion
From the nomination letters
"The thesis combines the rigorous scientific methodology associated with computer systems research (including the focus on principles and abstraction) with an unusually extensive (and meaningful) use of mathematical methods, in particular queuing theory and statistical tests build into the tools and systems."
"This is an instance of a 'multiple thesis in one' thesis, not a 'multiple papers stabled in a thesis'"
"It is an excellent illustration of how a scholar should approach a research topic, carefully analyze the problem, and make contributions across analysis tools, system design, and overall applications."
Honorable Mentions
Oana Balmau
at the University of Sydney
for her dissertation:
Redesigning Persistent Key-Value Stores for Future Workloads, Hardware, and Performance Requirements
Advised by Willy Zwaenepoel
&
Xingda Wei
at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
for his dissertation
Fast Distributed Transaction Processing using RDMA and NVM
Advised by Binyu Zang, Rong Chen, and Haibo Chen