ASPLOS

It is our pleasure to introduce the technical program for the fifteenth edition of ASPLOS. The conference this year continues and reinforces the ASPLOS tradition of publishing innovative research spanning the boundaries of hardware, computer architecture, compilers, programming languages, operating systems, and distributed computing.

We received 181 submissions this year, which was a record and a significant reversal of a trend from the last 3 years (158, 127 and 113 in 2006, 2008 and 2009, respectively). 19 submissions had PC members as co-authors. The most dominant theme, by far, was parallel processing: over half of the submissions were directly related to this topic, most of which mentioned multicore, manycore, SIMD, or heterogeneous architectures as a target.

There were two key changes in the ASPLOS paper reviewing process this year, both of which have been used in other systems conferences: two rounds of reviews, and the use of an External Review Committee preselected by the Program Chair. Each paper was initially reviewed by two PC members and one ERC member. Based on these reviews, 91 papers were selected for a second round of reviews; see the Program Chair's Report on the ASPLOS Web site for the details on how these were selected. These papers received one or two more PC reviews plus one more ERC review. Together, these two changes held the average reviewing load per PC member to under 18 papers, while allowing them to spend more time on papers with a significant chance of being accepted.

The PC met in person at the Chicago O'Hare Hilton for a one-day meeting on Oct. 30, 2009. 73 papers were discussed at the meeting. The PC chose 32 papers to be presented at the conference, for an overall acceptance rate of 17.7%. 6 of the 32 have PC members as co-authors. In another departure from previous years, all papers were assigned a shepherd to ensure that the final papers adequately addressed the concerns of the reviewers. The PC also awarded a Best Paper Award and nominated three papers for the CACM Research Highlights.

If ASPLOS XV is successful, as we hope, numerous people should share the credit. Most of all, the technical program directly reflects the high quality of the submitted papers; we thank all the authors of the submissions for their effort. The members of the PC and ERC put in a very substantial effort for reviewing and shepherding, and for selecting the award papers. Mike Hind (IBM Research), in particular, also handled the review process and discussions for papers where the PC chair had conflicts, and provided valuable advice during the reviewing process. Seth Goldstein (CMU) once again organized and put his inimitable stamp on the ASPLOS Wild and Crazy Ideas session. We owe them all a debt of gratitude.

The extensive logistics behind organizing this conference have been handled by the tireless effort of a large team of Pittsburgh volunteers: Shimin Chen (Intel), Allen Cheng (Pitt), Sangyeun Cho (Pitt), Franz Franchetti (CMU), Ken Mai (CMU), Todd Mowry (CMU), Onur Mutlu (CMU), Jun Yang (Pitt) and Youtao Zhang (Pitt). Each member of this team played an important role in making ASPLOS in Pittsburgh a success. In addition, the ASPLOS Steering Committee gave us timely and valuable guidance over the last year. We want to thank all members of the organizing committee and the steering committee for the time and attention they have invested in this conference.