OSDI'99 Technical Program - Tuesday, February 23

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[Tuesday, Feb.23] [Wednesday, Feb.24] [Thursday, Feb.25]

Technical Program Tuesday, February 23

9:00am - 10:30am
Opening Remarks and Keynote Address
The Blind Men and The Elephant

Jim Gettys
Senior Consultant Engineer Industry Standards and Consortia, Compaq Computer Corporation
Visiting Scientist, M.I.T., W3C

To the packet junkies, HTTP is an abuser of TCP and the Internet; they are right. But HTTP is being used in ways very different than originally envisioned. There are serious proposals to "fix" TCP. Are these good, or bad ideas? Or should we fix HTTP? Or both?

To those who work at the top of the "content" chain, the Web is a badly done markup language with terrible graphics (e.g. HTML, GIF images); work is underway to replace or augment these with better technologies: style sheets, XML, PNG, richer graphics languages, etc. What impact will these have on the network and the use of HTTP itself? Does extrapolating from current Internet/Web usage make any sense?

To the person building interoperable Internet applications, HTTP is a honey-pot. There is the perception that HTTP gets through firewalls, so applications are going HTTP POSTal. What cement trucks are being driven through this hole? What are the advantages/disadvantages or costs?

The famous poem by John Godfrey Saxe, based on Indian folklore, describes the view of an elephant by 6 blind men. Unless we understand the shape of the beast, the Web is unlikely to fulfill its potential.

"And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long

Each in his own opinion,

Exceeding stiff and strong.

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong!

Moral:

So, oft in theologic wars,

The disputants, I ween,

Rail on in utter ignorance

Of what each other mean,

And prate about an Elephant

Not one of them has seen!"
-John Godfrey Saxe

Jim Gettys is a Senior Consultant Engineer for Compaq Computer Corporation's Industry Standards and Consortia Group and is a Visiting Scientist at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at M.I.T.
     Jim is the chair of the HTTP/NG Protocol Design Working Group (PDG) of W3C. The HTTP/NG activity consists of the Web Characterization working group (WCG), works on characterizing how the Web is being used, and the PDG, which uses the insights gained in a prototype redesign of the Web's transport protocol.
     Gettys joined Digital Equipment Corporation in 1983 to work on Project Athena, a joint experiment of MIT, Digital, and IBM for the educational use of computers in undergraduate education. As one of the first contributors to the project, Gettys installed the software on the initial network of more than 30 VAX machines and built a network installation system for these machines.
     With Bob Scheifler, Jim is co-designer of the X Window System. Gettys' designed the X Library and contributing to X Window System core protocol. Via the Internet, Gettys coordinated the development efforts of contributors both inside and outside Digital of the X Windows System, one of the first major software systems to be built in a distributed, collaborative fashion.
     Prior to joining Digital, Gettys worked for The Institute for Advanced Study, and The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, where he worked on such projects as the development of the infrared telescope for Space Lab II.

10:30am - 11:00am Break

11:00am - 12:30pm
I/O

Session Chair: Sean O'Malley, Network Appliance

Automatic I/O Hint Generation through Speculative Execution
Fay Chang, Garth A. Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University

IO-Lite: A Unified I/O Buffering and Caching System
Vivek S. Pai, Peter Druschel, Willy Zwaenepoel, Rice University

Virtual Log Based File Systems for a Programmable Disk
Randolph Y. Wang, University of California, Berkeley; Thomas E. Anderson, University of Washington, Seattle; David A. Patterson, University of California, Berkeley

12:30pm - 2:00pm Lunch (on your own)

2:00pm - 3:30pm
Resource Management

Session Chair: Greg Minshall, Siara Systems

Resource Containers: A New Facility for Resource Management in Server Systems
Gaurav Banga, Peter Druschel, Rice University; Jeffrey C. Mogul, Western Research Laboratory, Compaq Computer Corp.

Defending Against Denial of Service Attacks in Scout
Oliver Spatscheck, University of Arizona; Larry L. Peterson, Princeton University

Self-Paging in the Nemesis Operating System
Steven M. Hand, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

3:30pm - 4:00pm Break

4:00pm - 5:30pm
Panel Discussion: Virtual Machine-based Operating Systems

Moderator: Paul Leach, Microsoft Corporation
Participants: TBD

[Tuesday, Feb.23] [Wednesday, Feb.24] [Thursday, Feb.25]

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