This special issue of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems presents the three papers from the 2019 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC’19) that won the Best Paper Award. The scope of ATC is broad. It covers all practical aspects related to systems software, and its goal is to improve and further the knowledge of computing systems of all scales, from small embedded devices to large data centers, while emphasizing implementations and experimental results. ATC underwent significant changes and improvements in 2019. ATC’19 received 356 submissions and accepted 71 (nearly 20%) through a double-blind, tworound review process in which each round 2 submission was reviewed by 5 to 6 program committee (PC) members. After the ATC’19 program was finalized, the Best Paper Award selection process proceeded in two phases. In the first phase, we combined several signals. One was an explicit ranking by reviewers marking papers worthy of consideration for the best paper, and any paper marked for such consideration by two or more PC members was passed to the second phase. Additionally, we considered general review ranks and deliberations (both online and during the PC meeting), moving several additional top-ranking papers to the second phase. Last, we collected explicit nominations by PC members for the Best Paper Award. At the end of the first phase, we generated a short-list of eight candidate papers. At this stage, we appointed a team of six PC members consisting of senior and experienced members of the systems research community. During a period of 4 weeks, the team read the papers, and we discussed each separately for best paper worthiness. We did not place a quota on the number of Best Paper Awards. Generally, the committee favored papers with original or surprising contributions, and/or ones that would spark interest and establish a new direction for follow-on works. At the end of the second stage, we elected three papers to receive the ATC’19 Best Paper Award, which are presented in this special issue. All three works include additional material relative to their conference version, which has been reviewed (in “fast-track mode”) by one or two of the original ATC’19 reviewers. The first work is “SILK+: Preventing Latency Spikes in Log-Structured Merge Key-Value Stores Running Heterogeneous Workloads” by Oana Balmau, Florin Dinu, Willy Zwaenepoel, Karan Gupta, Ravishankar Chandhiramoorthi, and Diego Didona, which introduces techniques that manage to lower the 99th percentile latencies by up to two orders of magnitude relative to common log-structured merge key-value stores. The second work is “Transactuations: Where Transactions Meet the Physical World” by Aritra Sengupta, Tanakorn Leesatapornwongsa, Masoud Saeida Ardekani, and Cesar A. Stuardo, which uncovers IoT application inconsistencies manifesting out of failures and proposes a useful abstraction and execution model to combat this problem.

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USENIX ATC 2019获奖论文特刊介绍

本期 ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 特刊介绍了 2019 年 USENIX 年度技术会议 (ATC'19) 获得最佳论文奖的三篇论文。ATC 的范围很广。它涵盖了与系统软件相关的所有实践方面，其目标是提高和进一步了解各种规模的计算系统，从小型嵌入式设备到大型数据中心，同时强调实现和实验结果。ATC 在 2019 年经历了重大变化和改进。 ATC'19 通过双盲、两轮审查过程收到 356 份提交并接受了 71 份（接近 20%），其中每轮 2 提交由 5 至 6 名程序委员会 (PC) 成员审查. ATC'19 计划最终确定后，最佳论文奖评选过程分两个阶段进行。在第一阶段，我们结合了几个信号。一个是由审稿人将值得考虑的最佳论文进行明确排名，任何被两名或更多 PC 成员标记为此类考虑的论文都会进入第二阶段。此外，我们还考虑了一般审查排名和审议（在线和 PC 会议期间），将另外几篇排名靠前的论文移至第二阶段。最后，我们收集了 PC 成员对最佳论文奖的明确提名。在第一阶段结束时，我们生成了一份包含 8 篇候选论文的短名单。在这个阶段，我们任命了一个由六名 PC 成员组成的团队，由系统研究界的资深和经验丰富的成员组成。在 4 周的时间里，团队阅读了论文，我们分别讨论了每篇论文的最佳价值。我们没有对最佳论文奖的数量设置配额。一般来说，委员会青睐具有原创性或惊人贡献的论文，和/或能够激发兴趣并为后续工作建立新方向的论文。在第二阶段结束时，我们选出了三篇获得 ATC'19 最佳论文奖的论文，这些论文将在本期特刊中呈现。所有三部作品都包含与其会议版本相关的附加材料，这些材料已由一两个原始 ATC'19 审阅者审阅（以“快速通道模式”）。第一项工作是 Oana Balmau、Florin Dinu、Willy Zwaenepoel、Karan Gupta、Ravishankar Chandhiramoorthi 和 Diego Didona 的“SILK+：防止运行异构工作负载的日志结构合并键值存储中的延迟峰值”，它引入的技术能够将 99% 的延迟相对于常见的日志结构合并键值存储最多降低两个数量级。第二部作品是 Aritra Sengupta、Tanakorn Leesatapornwongsa、Masoud Saeida Ardekani 和 Cesar A. Stuardo 的“交易：交易与物理世界相遇的地方”，它揭示了因故障而出现的物联网应用不一致性，并提出了一个有用的抽象和执行模型来对抗这个问题。