Dear Colleague: It is time for our community to define the charter of operating systems research for the coming decade. Are there enough fertile research areas in our core areas, or should we be embracing more divergent areas: the World Wide Web, Distributed Systems, Languages, etc.? Our Keynote, Jim Gettys, will explain why the World Wide Web is an operating systems issue, and our panel on virtual machine-based systems will address the interaction between OS research and language environments.

It is our pleasure to bring you the program for the Third USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation. With the help of a fabulous program committee, we have assembled a collection of papers that reflect the identity crisis in which our field finds itself. We received papers from nearly every field of computer systems research: distributed systems, programming tools, language-based systems, databases, I/O systems, file systems, and fault tolerance. However, the resulting program mirrors the core technologies of the operating system business: I/O, file systems, virtual memory, resource management, scheduling, kernels, and distribution.

We look forward to having you join us in New Orleans, February 22-25, to explore these and other important issues for our field.

For the OSDI Program Committee,

Margo Seltzer Harvard University Program Co-Chair

Paul Leach Microsoft Corporation Program Co-Chair

PS: Remember to sign up for your tutorial early. See Registration information.