SIGOPS FY'04 Annual Report

July 2003 - June 2004
Submitted by: Keith Marzullo, SIGOPS Chair

The SIGOPS community is as vital as ever. Despite the "operating systems" in our name, we continue to involve people who are interested in a wide range of systems issues, as exhibited by the content in the conferences listed above. In addition to core topics in operating systems, our community's interests span distributed systems, networks and the Internet, middleware, pervasive computing, security, mobile computing, multimedia systems, and more. Some areas that seem to be of rapidly increasing interest are pervasive computing, power management, sensor networks, security, scalable Internet services, peer-to-peer storage, and overlay networks.

This report covers the ACM year of July 2003 through June 2004.

We sponsored or co-sponsored the usual suite of top-rate conferences, including Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC, held in July in Boston), SenSys (November, in Los Angeles), and Operating Systems Principles (SOSP, held in October in Bolton Landing, NY). We also supported, in cooperation, Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI, held in May in San Francisco), File and Storage Technologies (FAST, held in March-April in San Francisco) and Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys, held in June in Boston).

At PODC, the annual Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize was given to Maurice Herlihy of Brown University for "Wait-free synchronization", which appeared in TOPLAS in 1991. This award has been recently renamed, having formerly been awarded three times as the PODC Influential Paper Award. PODC is currently working with DISC to broaden the sponsorship of this award, both to increase its visibility and endowment.

At SOSP, the Mark Weiser award to given to Michael Burrows of the Bay Area Microsoft Research Laboratory. The award is presented each year at OSDI and SOSP to an individual "who has demonstrated creativity and innovation in operating systems research" and who began his or her career no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination. Jeanna Matthews also led a successful effort to webcast (and videocapture) this version of SOSP.

Coming soon, the European Workshop will be held in Leuven, Brussels. We look forward to seeing many of you there. Next year, SOSP will be also in Europe - in Brighton, UK. Andy Herbert is the general chair and Ken Birman is the program chair. This is the first step of the implementation of a policy agreed upon in 2001 SOSP, to hold every third SOSP in Europe.

There is some debate in the SIGOPS community as to whether the SIGOPS European Workshop should become a full-fledged conference. This is an issue that generates strong opinions on both sides of the question. It will be discussed in Leuven, and the SIGOPS officers welcomes your thoughts.

We continue to communicate to our membership through the Operating Systems Review newsletter and the monthly email to the SIGOPS-announce mailing list. We continually strive to serve our community and our members well. The number of members is, however, decreasing. Although our conferences are well attended and in increasing numbers, and the research community is thriving, we find that fewer members of that community choose to become SIGOPS members. We encourage all systems researchers to continue support our community and to join SIGOPS.

I close with a great big thanks to all of those who work with us to make SIGOPS activities a great success: all the program chairs and their committees, all the general chairs and their committees, and all the ACM staff. I particularly thank my co-officers Gilles Muller, Jeanna Matthews, and Geoff Voelker, our newsletter editor Bill Waite, and our ACM program manager Irene Frawley.