OSDI Is Going Annual

USENIX is pleased to announce that OSDI, the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, will take place every year beginning in 2021.

In late 2019 members of the systems research community came together to present a proposal for OSDI and SOSP, the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, to occur annually rather than biennially. Their goal was to support the publication of more works produced by the growing number of researchers in the field. Although the number of publication venues has grown since the inception of both SOSP and OSDI, the number of active researchers in the field has increased much more significantly.

USENIX and ACM SIGOPS carefully considered this proposal, taking into account the needs of the community, the load placed on reviewers, the existing publication venues, the different options to scale up OSDI and SOSP, and the financial commitments created by contractual obligations to venues. Ultimately USENIX decided to hold OSDI in 2021 and 2022 as a two-year initial experiment. ACM SIGOPS supports USENIX's experiment and will assess the effects of OSDI's new annual pace before deciding whether SOSP will remain biennial or become annual also.

OSDI '21 is scheduled to take place July 14–16, 2021, in Santa Clara, CA, USA, and OSDI '22 is scheduled for July 11–13, 2022, in Carlsbad, CA, USA. In considering how best to insert OSDI into the annual calendar of events for both USENIX and the systems research community at large, it was most important to relocate OSDI out of the traditional autumn timeframe it has shared with SOSP in alternating years. We also considered the submission and review cycles of other events, USENIX's management of other conferences, and the bandwidth of our existing staff.

Scheduling OSDI in July allows us to co-locate the event with the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, providing the community with the opportunity to gather in a single location over the same dates to experience two venues that highlight work across the entire spectrum of systems research: OSDI, USENIX's premier venue for foundational papers addressing fundamental principles of systems design and implementation, and ATC, USENIX's flagship conference that maintains a strong practical bias and emphasis on implementation. These complementary events occurring simultaneously offer an unparalleled opportunity for systems researchers to gather together and experience more of the latest research in one place, at one time.

The Calls for Papers for OSDI '21 and USENIX ATC '21 will be available soon.

This new schedule also affords OSDI and SOSP a new opportunity for collaborative reviewing. Specifically, authors of papers rejected from OSDI '21 and resubmitted to SOSP 2021 will be required by the SOSP PC to provide their OSDI reviews, other PC commentary such as discussion summaries, and a description of how they changed the paper to address the OSDI PC's feedback. Furthermore, OSDI '21 PC reviewers of such resubmitted papers may choose to participate in SOSP 2021 PC discussions of those resubmissions even if they aren't on that PC. The chief aims of this collaborative reviewing are to reduce the reviewing load on the overall systems community for papers whose previous versions already received significant attention, and to ensure that "on the fence" submissions to OSDI '21 are more likely to be accepted after they address significant shortcomings beyond the scope of shepherding.

The addition of a submission and review cycle into the calendar year likely will affect reviewer load and submissions to all systems research venues. In partnership with ACM SIGOPS, USENIX will closely monitor these impacts on the community, and will make any needed changes based on available data in advance of our 2023 conferences.

We thank the community for raising this concern, suggesting this course of action, and joining us in supporting this experiment. We also thank ACM SIGOPS for its partnership with USENIX in considering how best we can support our shared community. We look forward to receiving your submissions and to seeing you at OSDI and USENIX ATC in July 2021.