Osdi Workflow

OSDI Workflow

Project-manage the OSDI year. All dates below are the verified OSDI '26 pipeline (read 2026-07-08) and are one cycle's snapshot; the '27 CFP was not yet posted at check time (待核实), so anchor the next cycle only after usenix.org/conference/osdi27 publishes its dates.

The 2026 pipeline, with what each date actually demanded

Three structural notes that surprise newcomers:

• The deadlines are Pacific clock time, not AoE. 2:59 pm PST is late-night only in Europe; in East Asia it is early morning the next day. Compute your local cutoff explicitly and pin it in the team calendar.
• Registration is a real deadline a week before the paper. Miss December 4 and December 11 is irrelevant.
• Nothing happens between December and March that you can influence. OSDI '26 had no author-response period, so the review window is silent by design.

Backward plan from December

Work backward from submission, owning each risk by name:

T-16 weeks  evaluation hardware secured; baselines building and running
T-12 weeks  end-to-end workload runs on the full system; first honest numbers
T-8  weeks  design sections drafted; experiment matrix frozen (osdi-experiments)
T-5  weeks  full draft at ~12 pages; internal "hostile PC" read scheduled
T-3  weeks  rewrite from the hostile read; every objection answered in-text,
            because no rebuttal will exist to answer it later
T-1  week   register title/abstract/track on HotCRP (the Dec 4 gate)
T-3 days    anonymization sweep: names, institutions, renamed system, metadata
T-0         submit; verify by re-downloading from HotCRP, not from memory

The hostile-read slot at T-5 is the workflow's load-bearing beam in a no-response cycle: it is the only rebuttal your paper will ever get, so schedule real colleagues against real review criteria, not a proofread.

The silent window (December → March)

Use the review window for work that pays regardless of outcome:

• Prepare the artifact now — the OSDI '26 Call for Artifacts explicitly encouraged preparing while the paper is under consideration, and the May 8 deadline lands close to the March 26 notification (osdi-artifact-evaluation).
• Keep the testbed image and traces frozen; a conditional accept can mandate new experiments on short notice (osdi-author-response).
• Draft the retarget: if rejected, which venue, and what must change beyond formatting.

Notification branches (March 26)

• Accept — proceed to osdi-camera-ready; June 9 is closer than it looks once the artifact appendix and de-anonymization are in the loop.
• Conditional accept — the heavyweight branch: the PC's mandated changes must be completed by the final-paper deadline and approved by the shepherd, or the paper is rejected from the program. Treat the shepherd letter as a contract with a June 9 delivery date (osdi-author-response).
• Reject — run the retarget within two weeks while the reviews are fresh. Both flagships are annual now (OSDI since 2021, SOSP since 2024), so the realistic map is SOSP or NSDI next, EuroSys or the ACM SIGOPS-stewarded ATC as the widening circle. Fix what reviews actually said before re-aiming; systems PCs overlap heavily.

The retargeting calendar

Because OSDI (annual since 2021) and SOSP (annual since 2024) both offer a deadline every year, a systems paper is never more than a few months from its next flagship shot. Sketch of the circuit as of the 2026 cycle — every row 待核实 against the live CFP before committing, since each venue re-sets dates annually:

Retargeting rule: one venue hop per revision. Fix what the reviews said, then aim once; papers that ricochet unchanged through the circuit meet the same reviewers.

Failure modes this skill exists to prevent

• Discovering the PST convention at 11 pm AoE on deadline day.
• Skipping title registration because "the paper deadline is the deadline."
• Spending the silent window idle, then hitting May 8 with no artifact and June 9 with unshepherded mandated changes.
• Resubmitting a rejected paper unchanged to a PC that half-overlaps last year's.

Multi-paper coordination

Groups submitting several papers to one OSDI deadline inherit extra constraints: the eight-submissions-per-author cap binds across the group's author lists, so reconcile who is on what before registration week, not after; shared infrastructure (testbed, trace archive, figure pipeline) should be frozen once for all papers to prevent one team's kernel upgrade from invalidating another's runs; and the December 4 registration gate is the natural checkpoint for a group-level go/no-go on each paper — a weak submission spends reviewer goodwill that a strong one from the same group may need.

Output format

[Cycle] OSDI '<yy> — dates confirmed live? yes/no (if no: 待核实)
[Today's phase] pre-registration / silent window / shepherding / camera-ready / retarget
[Next gate] date + what must be true + owner
[Local cutoff] Pacific deadline converted to team time zone
[Risk ledger] top 3 risks to the next gate, each with a named owner