The programs for 2 conferences with mainly operating and distributed systems contributions are online now:

• 1^st EuroSys Conference, April 18-21, 2006, Leuven, Belgium
• 3^rd Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI’06), May 8-10, 2006, San Jose, CA

With 58 papers between the two conferences the systems research field appears to be very healthy. I participated in the program committee for Eurosys, and I believe there was a total of over 170 submissions. Assuming NSDI received a similar number of submissions, and of the same quality, there is a lot of good experimental work going on.

I sure hope the organizations for both conferences will be making the papers available online as soon as the authors produce their final versions. There is no gain in keeping the content of the papers obscured until the conference: making the papers available early will create a better prepared audience, with better questions and discussion.

The Eurosys program committee was the last remnant of my former academic life and it is going to be my last program committee for a while; I don’t have the bandwidth anymore to give papers the attention they deserve. For Eurosys I had to review between 30 and 40 papers, each with 14 pages of deep technical content. We did a lot of group reviewing, which was a great help, but I spent too many late nights on this to be fun.