Dear Colleague,

OSDI '02 continues the conference's tradition of presenting the best innovative work in the systems software area, taking a broad view of what the area encompasses. We believe that this year's conference contains some of the most original, intriguing, and important work in the field today — work that you, as a systems practitioner, will find both stimulating and useful.

OSDI '02 drew a highly competitive selection from a large collection of diverse, original work submitted by authors internationally to form a program of creative, well-developed papers opening up new and innovative areas — not merely incremental results building on prior work.

The program presents important results in a wide range of areas, including distributed storage systems, robust software construction, OS kernel innovations, sensor networks, virtual machine monitors, large-scale network simulation, resource management architectures for Internet services, peer-to-peer systems, network analysis, and migration of execution environments.

OSDI '02 also offers more opportunities to learn about the state of the art in systems software through short Work-in-Progress presentations, an evening Panel Session on current trends in systems research, and a Poster Session where you'll get a chance to interact with researchers pursuing promising research ideas in their formative stages.

In summary, we believe this year's OSDI features an outstanding program giving insightful and useful results taken from the best of current systems software research and practice.

Please join us at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel on December 9-11, 2002.

For the OSDI '02 Program Committee,
David Culler, University of California, Berkeley
Peter Druschel, Rice University
Symposium Co-Chairs