The 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) seeks to present exciting, innovative research related to the design, implementation, analysis, evaluation, and deployment of computer systems software.

Topics

SOSP takes a broad view of the systems area and solicits contributions from many fields of systems practice, including, but not limited to: operating systems, file and storage systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, mobile and edge systems, secure and reliable systems, systems aspects of big data and machine learning, embedded and real-time systems, virtualization, and management and troubleshooting of complex systems. We also welcome work that explores the interaction of computer systems with related areas such as computer architecture, networking, programming languages, verification, and databases. In keeping with SOSP tradition, we will favor work that explores new territory, continues a significant research dialogue, or reflects on experience with or measurements of state-of-the-art implementations.

Submission Criteria

Papers will be judged on novelty, significance, interest, clarity, relevance, and correctness. A good paper will:

• Motivate a significant problem;
• Propose and implement an interesting, compelling solution;
• Demonstrate the practicality and benefits of the solution;
• Draw appropriate conclusions;
• Clearly describe the paper's contributions; and
• Clearly articulate the advances beyond previous work.

We encourage submission of groundbreaking work in significant new directions, with the understanding that evaluation criteria for papers addressing new problems may be different from those continuing a line of work in a more established area.

Originality

Submissions should contain original, unpublished material. Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism is not allowed.

Submissions that extend the authors' previous work are welcome, but authors must explain the differences between the SOSP submission and the prior work, much in the same way as the authors are expected to articulate the contributions of their submission as they relate to prior work by others.

Prior or concurrent workshop publication does not preclude publishing a related paper in SOSP. Authors should email the program co-chairs a copy of the related workshop paper and a short explanation of the new material in the conference paper beyond that published in the workshop version. As long as there is significant additional content in the submission compared to the prior workshop publication, the PC will evaluate the submission's entire contribution, not just the delta.

Prior or concurrent publication in non-peer-reviewed contexts, like arXiv.org, technical reports, talks, and social media posts, is explicitly permitted.

Author Response Period

SOSP will provide an opportunity for authors to respond to reviews prior to final consideration of the papers at the program committee meeting. Authors must limit their responses to (a) correcting factual errors in the reviews or (b) directly addressing questions posed by reviewers. Responses should be limited to clarifying the submitted work. In particular, responses must not include new experiments or data, describe additional work completed since submission, or promise additional work to follow. As PC members are not required to review supplementary materials, responses must not rely on the existence of those materials. (See details below.)

Submission of a response is optional. There is no explicit limit to the response, but authors are strongly encouraged to keep responses under 500 words; reviewers are neither required nor expected to read excessively long responses.

Anonymity

SOSP will use double-blind reviewing. Please make a good faith attempt to anonymize your submission. Avoid identifying yourself or your institution explicitly or by implication (e.g., through the references or acknowledgments). The first page should use the paper ID assigned during registration in place of the author names. If the name of your project or system is already known to the community (e.g., through technical reports, talks, social media posts, or other use), your SOSP submission must use an anonymized name.

Use care in referring to your own related work. Do not omit references to your prior work, as this would make it difficult for reviewers to place your submission in its proper context. Instead, reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work. For example, you might say "Our system modifies the XYZ operating system built by Lee et al. [Lee17]". For concurrent submissions, cite an anonymized version of the concurrent submission and discuss the relation between the submissions, and email the PC chairs a copy of your other concurrent submission.

If your submission reports on experiences with a system at your institution or organization, you should refer to the system anonymously but describe the properties of the system that are needed to appreciate the work (e.g., size of the user base, volume of requests, etc.). We recognize that, in some cases, these properties may allow a reviewer to identify your institution or organization.

Check with the program chairs if you are uncertain about the anonymity rules.

Formatting

Papers will be submitted electronically in PDF format via the web submission form.

Submissions may have at most 12 pages of technical content, including all text, figures, tables, etc. Bibliographic references are not included in the 12-page limit. Use A4 or US letter paper size, with all text and figures fitting inside a 178 x 229 mm (7 x 9 in) block centered on the page, using two columns separated by 8 mm (0.33) of whitespace. Use 10-point font (typeface Times Roman, Linux Libertine, etc.) on 12-point (single-spaced) leading. Graphs and figures should be readable when printed in grayscale, without magnification. All pages should be numbered, and references within the paper should be hyperlinked.

Authors may optionally include supplementary material, such as formal proofs or analyses, as a separate document; PC members are not required to read this material, so the submission must stand alone without it. Supplementary material is intended for items that are not critical for evaluating the paper but may be of interest to some readers.

Submissions violating these rules will not be considered for publication, and there will be no extensions for fixing violations. We encourage you to upload an early draft of the paper well before the deadline to check if the paper meets the formatting rules.

Most of these rules are automatically applied when using the official SIGPLAN Latex or MS Word templates from the ACM.

For Latex, we recommend you use:

\documentclass[sigplan,10pt]{acmart}
\renewcommand\footnotetextcopyrightpermission[1]{}
...
\settopmatter{printfolios=true}
\maketitle
\pagestyle{plain}
...

Confidentiality

Reviewing will be done mostly by members of the program committee, with limited use of outside reviewers. Submissions will be treated as confidential; however, papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered for publication.

Conflicts

To avoid conflicts of interest in the review process, when you register and submit your paper, we ask that you provide information about conflicts between any of the authors of your submission and PC members. Use the following guidelines to determine conflicts:

Institutional: You are currently employed at the same institution, have been previously employed at the same institution within the past two years, or are going to begin employment at the same institution.

Advisor or Collaborator: You have a past or present association as Ph.D. thesis advisor or advisee, or you have a collaboration on a project, publication, grant proposal, or editorship within the past two years (2021 or later).

The PC may review paper conflicts to ensure the integrity of the reviewing process, adding conflicts if necessary. Similarly, if there is no basis for conflicts provided by authors, such conflicts may be removed (e.g., do not improperly identify PC members as a conflict in an attempt to avoid having an individual review your paper). If you have any questions about conflicts, please contact the program co-chairs.

PC members will not be able to review, read the reviews of, or participate in discussions of papers they are conflicted with. The review process for papers conflicted with both PC chairs will be managed by another PC member designated as the "conflict chair". For any papers co-authored by the PC chairs, the conflict chair will be asked to hold them to a higher standard of being a "clear accept".

Accepted Papers

Papers selected by the program committee will be subject to revision and approval by a program committee member acting as a shepherd. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to supply electronic versions of their papers and encouraged to supply source code and raw data to help others replicate and understand their results, as part of an artifact evaluation process. To facilitate broad technical discussion, all accepted papers will be made available online in advance of the conference. The official publication date will be the date the proceedings are made publicly accessible. For more information about the ACM OpenSurround Service, please go to https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/free-access. Papers of particular merit will be forwarded to the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) and the Communications of the ACM's Research Highlights (CACM RH) for possible publication.

Submission Information

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format via the web submission form

Questions

Any questions about paper submissions can be emailed to sosp23-pc-chairs@mpi-sws.org.