Generated by GPT-5-mini| HotOS | |
|---|---|
| Name | HotOS |
| Discipline | Computer science |
| Abbreviation | HotOS |
| Country | International |
| Frequency | Biennial (historically) |
| Established | 1997 |
HotOS HotOS is a biennial invitational workshop series focused on experimental and forward‑looking research in operating systems and systems software. The workshop has convened researchers, engineers, and technologists from institutions such as Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University to explore novel ideas and speculative designs. Participants often include contributors from industry labs like Microsoft Research, Google Research, Amazon Web Services, Intel Corporation, and IBM Research, as well as students and faculty who later publish in venues such as ACM SIGCOMM, USENIX, ACM SOSP, and USENIX OSDI.
HotOS serves as a small, discussion‑oriented forum that emphasizes disruptive thinking over incremental results; attendees include faculty from Harvard University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and ETH Zurich as well as engineers from Facebook (Meta), Apple Inc., NVIDIA, and ARM Holdings. The program typically includes short position papers, lightning talks, extended discussions, and breakouts that have influenced projects at Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Bellcore, and national labs like Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Organizers and recurring participants have included researchers affiliated with ACM, IEEE, SIGOPS, NSF, and industrial consortia like OpenStack Foundation and Linux Foundation.
The workshop series was inaugurated in the late 1990s with founders and early organizers drawn from groups at University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory, attracting early work related to distributed systems that intersected with projects at DARPA, NSF, and corporate research such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Over successive editions, HotOS cultivated ties to influential events and programs including ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, EuroSys, and workshops tied to SIGCOMM and VLDB. The format evolved through contributions from chairs and committee members from Princeton University, University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign, Columbia University, and University of Washington, who adapted submission models and discussion formats influenced by practices at CHI, ICML, and NeurIPS gatherings.
HotOS has covered emergent topics such as virtualization and hypervisors influenced by work at Xen Project, KVM, and VMware Research; storage and file systems research connected to projects like Google File System, Ceph, and ZFS; and scheduling and resource management intersecting with systems from Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, and Hadoop. Other recurrent themes include security and isolation research related to SELinux, Intel SGX, and ARM TrustZone, energy‑aware systems studied alongside efforts at DOE labs and companies like Qualcomm, networking and middlebox research with relevance to Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, and edge and fog computing linked to initiatives by Telefonica, AT&T, and Orange S.A.. HotOS has also engaged topics in distributed consensus and fault tolerance in the tradition of results such as Paxos, Raft, and work from Google Research on consistency models.
Several editions of the workshop became touchstones because of influential discussions and attendance by leading labs and universities. Early meetings saw participants from Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Microsoft Research Redmond, and Bell Labs Innovations alongside academics from Yale University and Brown University. Later influential editions included gatherings where attendees from Facebook AI Research, Google DeepMind, and Amazon Lab126 debated resource disaggregation and datacenter designs that resonated with initiatives at Intel Labs, ARM Research, and national initiatives such as HPC centers and projects supported by NSF and DARPA. Special‑topic editions have featured panels with members from Open Compute Project, Linux Foundation, and OpenStack Foundation, and attracted press coverage linked to demonstrations at trade shows like CES and conferences like SIGGRAPH when systems work intersected with graphics and multimedia.
Papers and position statements presented at HotOS have presaged larger efforts later published in venues such as ACM SOSP, USENIX OSDI, IEEE S&P, and ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. Contributions have included early proposals for resource disaggregation that influenced hardware designs at Intel Corporation and NVIDIA, file‑system innovations that informed Google File System‑inspired clusters, and novel scheduling paradigms that influenced orchestration projects like Kubernetes. Authors have come from institutions such as University of Michigan, Cornell University, University of Toronto, and McGill University, and industry authorship from IBM Research, HP Labs, Oracle Corporation, and Facebook (Meta). HotOS position papers frequently sparked follow‑on systems, collaborations, and grant efforts funded by NSF, DARPA, and corporate research programs.
HotOS has had outsized influence on agenda setting in systems research by fostering early debate on topics later adopted by mainstream platforms and standards committees such as IETF, IEEE 802, and consortia like Open Compute Project. Alumni of the workshop have shaped curricula and labs at MIT, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley and contributed to major open‑source projects hosted by the Linux Foundation and Apache Software Foundation. The small‑scale, discussion‑centric format has been credited by participants from Microsoft Research, Google Research, Intel Labs, and IBM Research with accelerating speculative design work that later matured into production technologies and widely cited publications in venues including ACM SIGOPS Review and Communications of the ACM.