USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation

USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
Name	USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
Acronym	OSDI
Discipline	Computer science
Publisher	USENIX Association
Frequency	Biennial (historically)
Established	1994

Contents

USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation is a leading technical conference in computer science focused on operating system research, systems design, and implementation. The conference gathers researchers, engineers, and practitioners from institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and organizations including Google, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Amazon (company), and Facebook. Papers presented have influenced projects at Linux kernel, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, XNU and informed work at Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, ARM Holdings, and NVIDIA.

Overview

The conference emerged from earlier USENIX meetings and has roots linked to communities around Unix, BSD, and the broader systems research groups of the 1980s and 1990s, involving institutions such as Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and researchers affiliated with Stanford Research Institute. Foundational influences trace through historical projects like Multics, Project MAC, TENEX, and implementations at Hewlett-Packard, Sequent Computer Systems, Cray Research, and Silicon Graphics. Over time OSDI evolved alongside conferences such as SOSP, NSDI, FAST, SIGCOMM, PLDI, ASPLOS, EuroSys, and USENIX Security, adapting peer review, artifact evaluation, and open data policies informed by practices at ACM, IEEE, and funding agencies including the National Science Foundation and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The event has reflected shifts toward distributed systems, virtualization, cloud platforms, containerization technologies from Docker, orchestration via Kubernetes, and research on blockchain and trusted execution environments like Intel SGX.

Typical programs include refereed paper sessions, keynotes, invited talks, workshops, and poster sessions, with contributions from labs at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and companies like Oracle Corporation, VMware, Red Hat, Canonical (company), Spotify, Netflix, Dropbox, and Twitter. Panels have featured speakers from European Commission, IEEE Computer Society, ACM SIGOPS, ACM SIGPLAN, and policy actors at U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and Open Source Initiative. The review process mirrors standards from SIGCOMM, PLDI, and SOSP, often including artifact evaluation and reproducibility tracks similar to practices at NeurIPS and ICML. Workshops collocated with the conference have spawned communities around topics like storage (interacting with SCSI, NVMe), file systems (connecting to ZFS, ext4), concurrency (relating to POSIX, pthread), and security (relating to SELinux, AppArmor).

OSDI has been the venue for influential works that impacted projects such as Linux, ZFS, Ceph, Hadoop, MapReduce, Spanner, Raft, Paxos, Chubby, Dynamo, Bigtable, Google File System, Btrfs, Zookeeper, Thrift, Protocol Buffers, SQLite, LMAX Disruptor, and virtualization systems like Xen and KVM. Authors affiliated with Andrew S. Tanenbaum, David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy, Barbara Liskov, Butler Lampson, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, John Ousterhout, Leslie Lamport, Herb Sutter, and Michael Stonebraker have presented or been cited. Contributions include advances in scheduling, concurrency control, crash consistency, file system design, distributed consensus, storage architecture, memory management, and network stacks, influencing deployments at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Slack, and Salesforce.

OSDI papers and presenters have received recognition through awards and cross-citation with honors like the ACM Turing Award, IEEE John von Neumann Medal, ACM Software System Award, USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, and fellowships from ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. The conference program committee often includes recipients of these awards and members from institutions such as Royal Society, National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and recipients of grants from the Simons Foundation and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.