SOSP is going annual

In 2020, the SOSP Steering Committee and the SIGOPS Board considered feedback from the SIGOPS community about the cadence of the OSDI and SOSP conferences, and responded to that feedback in a public statement about the future of the two venues. In that statement, we noted that members of the community had expressed interest in scaling up publication capacity given the growth of the systems research community; that USENIX would experiment with an annual cadence of OSDI beginning in 2021; and that SIGOPS and the SOSP Steering Committee would await the result of that experiment before making a decision as to whether to move SOSP from a biennial cadence to an annual one.

Based on the positive community response to the annual cadence of OSDI, the SOSP Steering Committee has decided to experiment with moving SOSP to an annual cadence. Care has been taken in the consideration of this change to schedule the two annual venues so that submission deadlines, reviewing periods, and conferences do not conflict. SOSP will continue to take place in the fall, and continue to rotate internationally. As we make this change, the SOSP Steering Committee and SIGOPS Board will monitor SOSP’s reviewing load, review quality, and how community members experience the conference. We welcome suggestions from the community about how best to navigate this change, and look forward to reviewing how successful the change has been at future SIGOPS business meetings. As one would expect, holding more frequent conferences and publishing more papers will consume more effort by conference organizers and reviewers. We rely on the community’s support of this initiative.

Our first “even” SOSP, SOSP 2024, will take place in Austin, TX, in early November 2024, with general chairs Emmett Witchel and Chris Rossbach, and PC chairs Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Kim Keeton. A full CFP for SOSP 2024 will follow in due course. 

Of course, before then we have SOSP 2023 to look forward to in Koblenz, Germany on October 23-26 (at long last, after SOSP 2021 was forced to go virtual). We hope to see you there!  

The SOSP Steering Committee and SIGOPS Board.