brycewang-stanford OSDI Topic Selection
Decide venue months before writing, not days. Everything below reflects the OSDI '26
pages as read on 2026-07-08; the scope paragraph and track structure are re-issued in
every CFP, so reopen usenix.org/conference/osdi<yy>/call-for-papers before committing
a project to the December deadline.
The built-and-measured test
OSDI's identity is in its name: design and implementation. Before anything else, answer three questions honestly:
- Does the system exist? Not a simulator of the idea — the artifact itself, runnable under load. A design argued only from simulation or analysis is fighting the venue's instincts.
- Has it been measured against something that fights back? A mature baseline, a production-derived workload, a deployment. Microbenchmarks alone signal a workshop paper.
- Is there an idea that survives the implementation? Name the abstraction, mechanism, or principle a different team could reuse. If the honest answer is "we engineered X to be faster," the contribution is engineering, and OSDI reviewers will say so.
Failing question 1 or 2 does not kill the project — it re-times it. Both OS flagships now run annually (OSDI since 2021, SOSP since 2024), so waiting one build cycle costs months, not the two years it cost under the old alternation.
Is it in scope?
The OSDI '26 CFP takes a deliberately broad view of "systems": operating systems, file and storage systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, mobile systems, secure and reliable systems, systems aspects of big data, machine-learning systems, embedded systems, virtualization, networking as it relates to operating systems, and management and troubleshooting of complex systems. Two practical readings:
- ML-systems work is squarely welcome as systems work — scheduling, serving,
memory, parallelism — not as model-accuracy work (see TensorFlow and Orca in
../../resources/exemplars/library.md). - "Networking as it relates to operating systems" is the OSDI/NSDI border in one phrase: if the network is the object of study, it is NSDI's; if the host stack is, it can be OSDI's.
Two tracks, one deadline
OSDI '26 reviewed two tracks side by side, registered and submitted on the same December dates:
| Track | The paper it wants | Choose it when |
|---|---|---|
| Research | New design + implementation + evaluation | The idea is the contribution and you built it to prove it |
| Operational Systems | Design, implementation, analysis, and experience of a deployed system | The system has run in production and the lessons are the contribution |
The Operational Systems track changes the evidence bar, not the quality bar: deployment scale, incident history, and longitudinal behavior substitute for head-to-head novelty. Do not put a research prototype in the operational track to dodge a novelty fight — experience is exactly what it cannot show.
Routing against the sibling venues
Decision sketch (verify each venue's live CFP before acting):
built OS/storage/distributed system, idea-led -> OSDI (Research)
same, but the story is production experience -> OSDI (Operational Systems)
same community, ACM cadence fits better -> SOSP (annual since 2024)
network is the object (protocols, fabrics) -> NSDI
persistence/storage stack is the whole story -> FAST
strong systems work, flagship bar uncertain -> EuroSys / ACM SIGOPS ATC
(USENIX ATC ended after ATC '25)
position paper, no artifact yet -> HotOS-style workshop first
Two cadence facts matter for routing. First, OSDI sits mid-year (OSDI '26: July 13–15, Seattle) with a December submission — a December miss can retarget to SOSP or NSDI within months. Second, USENIX ATC no longer exists as a USENIX venue; its successor is stewarded by ACM SIGOPS, so pre-2026 advice that treats ATC as OSDI's co-located little sibling is stale.
Timing snapshot for the routing decision
Anchor the decision to real dates, then re-verify them live:
- OSDI '26 (20th): July 13–15, 2026, Seattle; its submission gates were December 4/11, 2025 — already history for new work.
- OSDI '27 (21st): official page exists; secondary sources report July 7–9,
2027, Baltimore, and by historical pattern its deadline lands around December
2026 — but the '27 CFP was unreadable at 2026-07-08, so both the deadline and any
policy carry-over (tracks, page budget, no-response process) are 待核实 until
usenix.org/conference/osdi27publishes them. - A project deciding venue in mid-2026 is therefore really choosing between an expected December OSDI '27 deadline and whatever SOSP/NSDI gates fall earlier — pull all three live pages before promising the team a date.
Signals you are about to misfire
- The evaluation section would be all microbenchmarks — no end-to-end workload exists
yet. (Wait a cycle; see
osdi-experiments.) - The paper's strongest sentence is about the model, not the system — route to an ML venue, or reframe until the systems claim stands alone.
- The design is real but unbuilt — OSDI reviewers read "we expect" as "we have not."
- The contribution is a measurement study of others' systems with no design lesson — possible at OSDI, but the bar is a lesson that changes how people build, not a benchmark report.
- You cannot fit the idea into 12 reviewed pages without appendices — OSDI '26 allowed none at submission, so a proof-heavy contribution may belong at a venue that reviews supplements.
Output format
[OSDI fit] strong / plausible / misfit (one-line reason)
[Built-and-measured] artifact exists? measured against a real opponent? idea survives?
[Track] Research / Operational Systems (why)
[Scope lane] which CFP topic phrase this sits under
[Re-route] best alternative venue + next live deadline to check
[Cycle math] months lost if we wait one build cycle vs risk of submitting now