Dear Colleague,

Eric Brewer Peter Chen

The Sixth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '04) continues the conference's tradition of presenting the best innovative work in "systems," with a broad interpretation of area. 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. The full program is now available. Register today.

OSDI '04 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.

By coming to this year's OSDI, you will hear from and interact with researchers who are addressing a wide range of important questions. How should one structure a system to tolerate buggy components? Can we manage systems automatically in the presence of malicious attacks, configuration errors, overloaded components, and network outages? What should be the foundations and techniques for building fast, robust, secure, low-power storage systems? How can we find or tolerate bugs in operating systems code? How can one monitor and improve the performance and availability of distributed systems?

OSDI '04 also offers more opportunities to learn about the state of the art in systems software through short Work-in-Progress presentations on current trends in systems research. We are still seeking WIP proposals. Please see the activities page for more information.

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 Renaissance Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco, CA, December 6-8, 2004.

Early bird registration discounts are available. Register by November 19, 2004, to save.

For the OSDI '04 Program Committee,

Eric Brewer, University of California, Berkeley
Peter Chen, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
OSDI '04 Program Co-Chairs