Call for Papers
in PDF Format

First Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '04)
March 29–31, 2004
Grand Hyatt
San Francisco, California, USA

Sponsored by USENIX, in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM and ACM SIGOPS

Important Dates
Paper titles and abstracts due: September 15, 2003
Final paper submissions due: September 22, 2003
Notification of acceptance: December 11, 2003
Papers due for shepherding: January 26, 2004
Camera-ready final papers due: February 9, 2004
Poster proposals due: February 15, 2004
Poster notification: February 25, 2004

Conference Organizers

Program Chairs
Robert Morris, MIT
Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego

Program Committee
Brian Bershad, University of Washington
Bill Bolosky, Microsoft Research
Eric Brewer, University of California, Berkeley
Miguel Castro, Microsoft Research
Jeff Chase, Duke University
David Culler, University of California, Berkeley
Peter Druschel, Rice University
Dawson Engler, Stanford University
Steve Gribble, University of Washington
Butler Lampson, MIT and Microsoft Research
Barbara Liskov, MIT
Vern Paxson, ICIR and LBL
Jennifer Rexford, AT&T Research
Timothy Roscoe, Intel Research
Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford University
Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley
Marvin Theimer, Microsoft Research
Amin Vahdat, Duke University
Geoff Voelker, University of California, San Diego
Bill Weihl, Akamai

Steering Committee
Thomas Anderson, University of Washington
Peter Honeyman, CITI, University of Michigan
Mike Jones, Microsoft Research
Robert Morris, MIT
Mike Schroeder, Microsoft
Amin Vahdat, Duke University

Overview
NSDI 2004 is a new conference focused on the design principles of large-scale distributed and networked systems. We believe systems as diverse as scalable web services, peer-to-peer file sharing, sensor nets, and distributed network measurement share a set of common challenges. Progress in any of these areas requires a deep understanding of how researchers are addressing the challenges of large-scale systems in other contexts. Our goal is to bring together researchers from across the systems community -- including operating systems, distributed systems, and computer networking -- to foster a cross-disciplinary approach to addressing our common research challenges.

Topics
NSDI will provide a high-quality, single-track forum for presenting new results and discussing ideas that overlap these disciplines. We seek work that furthers the knowledge and understanding of the systems community as a whole, continues a significant research dialog, or pushes the architectural boundaries of large-scale network services. We solicit papers describing original and previously unpublished research. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Scalable techniques for providing high availability and reliability
• Security and robustness of highly complex systems
• Novel architectural approaches, e.g., for specific application domains
• Network measurements, workload and topology characterization
• Autonomous and self-configuring network, system, and overlay management
• Network virtualization and resource management
• Distributed storage, caching, and query optimization
• Network protocols and algorithms for complex distributed systems
• Operating system support for scalable network services
• Application experiences, for example in sensor networks, peer-to-peer systems, overlay networks, pervasive computing, and content distribution networks.