20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

An Invitation from the Program Chair

Dear Colleague,

SOSP ‘05 continues the conference's tradition of presenting the best innovative work in the systems software area, taking a broad view of what the area encompasses. We believe that this year's conference contains some of the most original, intriguing, and important work in the field today — work that the entire community, including systems practitioners as well as researchers, will find both stimulating and useful.

SOSP ‘05 drew a highly competitive selection from a large collection of diverse, original work submitted by authors internationally.  The selection criteria was tough: out of a record-setting 155 submissions, only 20 were accepted, and even these were subjected to an intensive feedback and shepherding process before the final acceptance.  Every one of them is an exceptional paper and, jointly, they form a program of creative, well-developed work.  These are papers that open new and innovative areas, offer unexpected insights, and will set the stage for years of future work.

The program presents important results in a wide range of areas, including distributed storage systems that slash energy costs while improving performance, virus detection and inhibition mechanisms that can stop an infection in its tracks within hundreds of milliseconds, new insights into robust software construction, ideas for using contextual information in everything from file search to system repair after a viral attack, and much more. 

Peer to peer computing has been the rage for much of the past decade.  We’ll see some of the best recent work, but will also have a panel session to debate the actual impact and future of this line of research.   Is peer-to-peer computing about to revolutionize distributed computing, or is the well running dry?  At SOSP ’05, we’ll learn the bottom line.

SOSP ‘05 also offers more opportunities to learn about the state of the art in systems software through short Work-in-Progress presentations and a Poster Session interleaved with the conference as a whole, so that each coffee break will bring a chance to meet some of the young researchers in the field and to learn about their work while it is still in its formative stages.

In summary, I believe this year's SOSP features an outstanding program giving insightful and useful results taken from the best of current systems software research and practice.

Please join us in Brighton from October 24-26, 2005.

Ken Birman