WASL '08 Home

WASL '08 will be co-located with OSDI '08.

Important Dates

Workshop Organizers

Overview

Topics

Deadline and Submission Instructions

Registration Materials

Web Submission Form

Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association

WASL '08 will be held immediately before the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '08), December 8–10, 2008.

Important Dates
Paper submissions due: Monday, September 8, 2008  Deadline Extended!
Notification to authors: Friday, October 17, 2008
Final files due: Thursday, November 13, 2008

Workshop Organizers

Program Chair
Greg Bronevetsky, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Program Committee
Christian Engelmann, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Raffael Marty, Splunk
Adam Oliner, Stanford University
Eduardo Pinheiro, Google Research
Ramendra K. Sahoo, IBM TJ Watson Laboratory
Bianca Schroeder, University of Toronto
Jon Stearley, Sandia National Laboratory
Sudharshan Vazhkudai, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Chad Verbowski, Microsoft
Chris Whitaker, Amazon.com

Overview
System logs contain a wide variety of information about system status and health, including events from various applications, daemons, and drivers, as well as sampled information such as resource utilization statistics. As such, these logs represent a rich source of information for the analysis and diagnosis of system problems and prediction of future system events. However, their lack of organization and the general lack of semantic consistency among the information from various software and hardware vendors means that most of this information content is wasted. Today's most popular log analysis technique is to use regular expressions either to detect events of interest or to filter the log so that a human operator can examine it manually. Clearly, this captures only a fraction of the information available in these logs and does not scale to the large systems common in business and supercomputing environments.

Topics
This workshop will focus on novel techniques for extracting operationally useful information from existing logs and on methods to improve the information content of future logs. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Reports on publicly available sources of sample log data
• Log anonymization
• Log feature detection and extraction
• Prediction of malfunction or misuse based on log data
• Statistical techniques to characterize log data
• Applications of Natural-Language Processing (NLP) to logs
• Scalable log compression
• Log comparison techniques
• Methods to enhance and standardize log semantics
• System diagnostic techniques
• Log visualization
• Analysis of services (problem ticket) logs

Deadline and Submission Instructions
Submitted papers must be no longer than 8 single-spaced 8.5" x 11" pages, including figures, tables, and references; two-column format, using 10-point type on 12-point (single-spaced) leading; and a text block 6.5" wide x 9" deep. Author names and affiliations should appear on the title page.

Papers must be in PDF and must be submitted via the Web submission form.

Authors will be notified of acceptance by October 17, 2008. Authors of accepted papers will produce a final PDF and the equivalent HTML by November 13, 2008. All papers will be available online to attendees prior to the workshop and will be available online to everyone starting on December 7, 2008.

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, and plagiarism constitute dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may, on the recommendation of a program chair, take action against authors who have committed them. In some cases, program committees may share information about submitted papers with other conference chairs and journal editors to ensure the integrity of papers under consideration. If a violation of these principles is found, sanctions may include, but are not limited to, barring the authors from submitting to or participating in USENIX conferences for a set period, contacting the authors' institutions, and publicizing the details of the case.

Authors uncertain whether their submission meets USENIX's guidelines should contact the program chair, wasl08chair@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. All submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX WASL '08 Web site.

Registration Materials
Complete program and registration information will be available in October 2008 on the workshop Web site. If you would like to receive the latest USENIX conference information, please join our mailing list.