The 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '24) will be held on April 16–18, 2024, in Santa Clara, CA, USA.

Sponsored by USENIX in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM and ACM SIGOPS
Important Dates

Spring deadline:

Paper titles and abstracts due: Thursday, April 27, 2023, 8:59 pm US PDT
Full paper submissions due: Thursday, May 4, 2023, 8:59 pm US PDT
Notification to authors: Friday, July 21, 2023
Final paper files due: Thursday, October 12, 2023

Fall deadline:

Paper titles and abstracts due: Thursday, September 7, 2023, 8:59 pm US PDT
Full paper submissions due: Thursday, September 14, 2023, 8:59 pm US PDT
Notification to authors: Thursday, December 7, 2023
Final paper files due: Tuesday, March 5, 2024


Conference Organizers

Program Co-Chair

Laurent Vanbever, ETH Zürich
Irene Zhang, Microsoft Researchd

Program Committee

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, University of California, Irvine, and VMware Research
Mohammad Alizadeh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Peter Alvaro, University of California, Santa Cruz
Gianni Antichi, Politecnico di Milano and Queen Mary University of London
Maria Apostolaki, Princeton University
Vaibhav Bajpai, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Tom Barbette, Université catholique de Louvain
Adam Belay, MIT CSAIL
Sonia Ben Mokhtar, LIRIS CNRS
Yérom-David Bromberg, Inria de l'Université de Rennes
Rodrigo Bruno, INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
Matthew Caesar, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Kang Chen, Tsinghua University
Rong Chen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Vijay Chidambaram, The University of Texas at Austin and EPFL
Marco Chiesa, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Young-ri Choi, UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology)
Paolo Costa, Microsoft Research
Italo Cunha, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Bruce Davie, Systems Approach
Shuwen Deng, Yale University
Aline Eid, University of Michigan
Eric Eide, University of Utah
Anja Feldmann, Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Ronaldo A. Ferreira, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul
Yasaman Ghasempour, Princeton University
Soudeh Ghorbani, Johns Hopkins University
Brighten Godfrey, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and VMware
Sergey Gorinsky, IMDEA Networks Institute
Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Arpit Gupta, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dongsu Han, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Haitham Hassanieh, EPFL
Oliver Hohlfeld, University of Kassel
Yu Hua, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Qun Huang, Peking University
Junchen Jiang, University of Chicago
Xin Jin, Peking University
Myoungsoo Jung, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Kostis Kaffes, Google
Anuj Kalia, Microsoft
Sanidhya Kashyap, EPFL
Antoine Kaufmann, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)
Daehyeok Kim, The University of Texas at Austin
Shir Landau Feibish, The Open University of Israel
Yanfang Le, AMD
Ben Leong, National University of Singapore
Philip Levis, Stanford University and Google
Amit Levy, Princeton University
Huaicheng Li, Virginia Tech
Jialin Li, National University of Singapore
John Liagouris, Boston University
Kate Ching-Ju Lin, National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University
Alan Zaoxing Liu, Boston University
Guyue Liu, New York University Shanghai
Ming Liu, University of Wisconsin—Madison
James Mickens, Harvard University
Akshay Narayan, University of California, Berkeley
Srinivas Narayana, Rutgers University
Deepak Narayanan, Microsoft Research
Neha Narula, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ravi Netravali, Princeton University
Dave Oran, Network Systems Research & Design
Amy Ousterhout, University of California, San Diego
Kay Ousterhout, Lightstep
Seo Jin Park, University of Southern California and Google
Luis Pedrosa, INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
Cristel Pelsser, Université catholique de Louvain
Amar Phanishayee, Microsoft Research
Dan Ports, Microsoft Research
Lili Qiu, The University of Texas at Austin
Rachee Singh
Barath Raghavan, University of Southern California
Costin Raiciu, Politehnica University of Bucharest
Gábor Rétvári, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Michael Schapira, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yizhou Shan, Huawei Cloud
Naveen Kr. Sharma, Google
Anirudh Sivaraman, New York University
Georgios Smaragdakis, Delft University of Technology
Elahe Soltanaghai, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
Ravi Soundararajan, VMware
Adriana Szekeres, VMware Research
Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo, University of Waterloo
Alain Tchana, Grenoble INP
Rashmi Vinayak, Carnegie Mellon University
Stefano Vissicchio, University College London
Zhaoguo Wang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Xingda Wei, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Hong Xu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Le Xu, The University of Texas at Austin
Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, The University of Texas at Austin and VMware Research
Francis Y. Yan, Microsoft Research
Suli Yang, Google
Nofel Yaseen, Meta
Lixia Zhang, University of California, Los Angeles
Yongle Zhang, Purdue University
Wenting Zheng, Carnegie Mellon University
Danyang Zhuo, Duke University
Steering Committee
Aditya Akella, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Sujata Banerjee, VMware Research
Ranjita Bhagwan, Microsoft Research India
Casey Henderson, USENIX Association
Jon Howell, VMware Research
Arvind Krishnamurthy, University of Washington
Jay Lorch, Microsoft Research
James Mickens, Harvard University
Jeff Mogul, Google
George Porter, University of California, San Diego
Timothy Roscoe, ETH Zurich
Srinivasan Seshan, Carnegie Mellon University
Renata Teixeira, Netflix
Minlan Yu, Harvard University

Overview

NSDI focuses on the design principles, implementation, and practical evaluation of networked and distributed systems. Our goal is to bring together researchers from across the networking and systems community to foster a broad approach to addressing overlapping research challenges.

NSDI provides a high-quality forum for presenting results and discussing ideas that further the knowledge and understanding of the networked systems community as a whole, continue a significant research dialog, or push the architectural boundaries of network services.
Topics

NSDI invites any innovative solution for a significant problem involving networked systems, including topics from within the following list:

Highly available and reliable networked systems
Security and privacy of networked systems
Distributed storage, caching, and query processing systems
Sustainable, low-energy, and low-carbon networked systems
Cloud/multi-tenant systems
Mobile and embedded/sensor applications and systems
Systems aspects of networking hardware and physical layer communication technologies
Network and workload measurement systems
Self-organizing, autonomous, and federated networked systems
Managing, debugging, and diagnosing problems in networked systems
Virtualization and resource management for networked systems
Experience with deployed networked systems
Networked systems for big data
Testing and/or verification applied to networked systems
Networked systems for machine learning (ML) and ML for networked systems

The following list is not exhaustive. That said, the program committee can reject any papers that they consider to be not in scope and relevant to the NSDI community during the review process. Please contact the PC chairs if you have questions about whether your paper would be in scope.

Two Deadlines

NSDI '24 offers authors the choice of two submission deadlines. Any paper submitted to one of these deadlines and accepted during the subsequent reviewing period will be presented at the conference and will appear as part of the proceedings. In the meantime, authors are permitted to advertise their papers as accepted by NSDI, for example listing them on CVs. For more information, see Additional Information about Multiple Deadlines Process.

One-Shot Revision

Each paper may be accepted, rejected, or given the option of one-shot revision. Such a revision decision includes a summary of the paper's merits and a list of necessary changes that are required for the paper to be accepted at NSDI. Authors may then submit a version of their work addressing all revision instructions during the subsequent deadline. At that point, the paper will be reviewed to judge whether it addresses all the revision requirements requested. This review will be conducted, to the extent possible, by the same reviewers as earlier. To enable this, PC members who give one-shot-revision decisions for the fall deadline are obligated to participate as external reviewers in the following year to review those papers' resubmissions, which would be considered for the following year's conference. Papers revised and resubmitted following a one-shot-revision decision can only receive a decision of accept or reject, not revise; this is what makes revisions "one-shot."

A revise-and-resubmit decision is not a guaranteed acceptance. While revised papers are generally accepted, they can be rejected if the revision instructions have not been fully addressed or if the revised version unveils new significant concerns that were hidden in the original submission.

The decision about whether to accept a revised paper will be made as follows. Reviewers will primarily judge whether the authors have satisfied the requests accompanying the revision decision. They will also judge the resubmission on its independent merits, but should avoid rejecting it for non-fatal concerns that they could have raised during the first round of reviews. The reviewers should also ensure that the revised paper doesn't introduce new assertions without sufficient support. Unlike the shepherding process, the revision instructions may include running additional experiments that obtain specific results, e.g., comparing performance against a certain alternative and beating it by at least 10%.

During the revision period, the paper is still considered under review to NSDI and therefore cannot be submitted to other conferences unless the authors first withdraw it from consideration (as per the USENIX Submission Policy, which precludes concurrent submission to other conferences).

Authors given a one-shot-revision decision will be sent, within a few days of the decision, detailed instructions about how to resubmit. These instructions will include the list of necessary changes that are required for the paper to be accepted. They will also explain how the authors should accompany their resubmission with auxiliary material to demonstrate how they've satisfied that list of changes. This auxiliary material will consist of (1) an additional version of the resubmission in which revision changes since the first submission are clearly marked, and (2) a separate textual explanation of the high-level differences between the two versions.

If authors receive a one-shot-revision decision for a paper submitted to the fall deadline of NSDI '24, this gives them the option to make the requested changes and resubmit it to the next NSDI deadline, which is the first deadline of NSDI '25. If the paper is accepted then, it will appear at NSDI '25, not NSDI '24.

Policy on Resubmissions

As described above, each NSDI conference consists of two deadlines: spring and fall. Papers rejected from one of these deadlines cannot be submitted to the immediate next deadline. For example, a paper rejected from the fall deadline of NSDI '23 may not be submitted to the spring deadline of NSDI '24 (but can be submitted to the fall deadline of NSDI '24); and a paper rejected from the spring deadline of NSDI '24 may not be submitted to the fall deadline of NSDI '24.

If authors receive a one-shot-revision decision but choose not to submit a revised version, the paper is treated as a reject and the same resubmission policy applies.

Operational Systems Track

NSDI '24 also solicits papers that describe the design, implementation, analysis, and experience with large-scale, operational systems and networks. We encourage the submission of papers that disprove or strengthen existing assumptions, deepen the understanding of existing problems, and validate known techniques at scales or environments in which they were never used or tested before. Such operational papers need not present new ideas or results to be accepted; indeed, new ideas or results will not influence whether the papers are accepted. Note that the rules regarding submission and anonymization are different for operational systems track papers. Since the evaluation of operational systems track papers requires understanding the real-world use of the system, papers in this track will be reviewed in a more limited double-blind process. Authors' names should be withheld, as usual. However, in contrast to other papers, authors need not anonymize the content of their submission in any other way—they may keep company names, links, real system names, etc. as appropriate for the paper.

Please note that you cannot switch tracks for your paper after submission since the submission rules differ.

Authors should indicate on the title page of the paper and in the submission form that they are submitting to this track.

The final program will explicitly identify papers accepted from the operational track to distinguish them from papers accepted from the regular track.

What to Submit

NSDI '24 is double-blind, meaning that authors should make a good faith effort to anonymize papers. Note that the operational track papers have different rules as described above. As an author, you should not identify yourself in the paper either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through the references or acknowledgments). However, only non-destructive anonymization is required. For example, system names may be left de-anonymized, if the system name is important for a reviewer to be able to evaluate the work. Please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

Remove authors' names and affiliations from the title page.
Remove acknowledgment of identifying names and funding sources.
Do not provide links to your own online content. If this online content is critical to the content of your paper, please see the submission form, which allows for some forms of content upload, or contact the PC chairs.
Use care in naming your files. Source file names, e.g., Joe.Smith.dvi, are often embedded in the final output as readily accessible comments.
Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, a good solution is to reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work. If you cite anonymous work, you will need to enter the de-anonymized reference(s) on the online submission form.
If you need to reference another submission at NSDI '24 on a related topic, reference it as follows: "A related paper describes the design and implementation of our compiler [24]." with the corresponding citation: "[24] Under submission. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing."
Work that extends an author's previous workshop paper is welcome, but the paper should (a) acknowledge their own previous workshop publications with an anonymous citation and (b) explain the differences between the NSDI submission and the prior workshop paper. The online submission form will also require authors to submit the deanonymized citation and a short explanation of the differences from the prior workshop paper.
Blinding is not intended to be a great burden. If blinding your paper seems too burdensome, please contact the program co-chairs and discuss your specific situation.

Submissions—as well as final papers—must be no longer than 12 pages, including footnotes, figures, and tables. Submissions may include as many additional pages as needed for references and for supplementary material in appendices. The paper should stand alone without the supplementary material, but authors may use this space for content that may be of interest to some readers but is peripheral to the main technical contributions of the paper. Note that members of the program committee are free to not read this material when reviewing the paper.

Submissions must be in two-column format, using 10-point type on 12-point (single-spaced) leading, in a text block 7" wide x 9" deep, with .33" inter-column space, formatted for 8.5" x 11" paper.

Papers not meeting these criteria will be rejected without review, and no deadline extensions will be granted for reformatting. Pages should be numbered, and figures and tables should be legible when printed without requiring magnification. Authors may use color in their figures, but the figures should be readable when printed in black and white. If you wish, you may use the template for LaTeX available on the conference paper templates page. All papers must be submitted via the submission form. Please do not email submissions.

Policies

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. See the USENIX Conference Submissions Policy for details.

Previous publication at a workshop is acceptable as long as the NSDI submission includes substantial new material that has been developed since the publication of any earlier version. However, NSDI submissions cannot be concurrent with submission to a workshop venue. If the notification date for the workshop submission is after the submission date for NSDI, this would be considered a concurrent submission and would be rejected without review. Such concurrent submissions would have limited the possibility of substantially extending the prior work, which would violate the intent of policies allowing for extended submissions (as described in http://www.sigcomm.org/about/policies/frequently-asked-questions-faq/) See remarks above about how to cite and contrast with a workshop paper.

Authors uncertain whether their submission meets USENIX's guidelines should contact the Program Co-Chairs, nsdi24chairs@usenix.org.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. All submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX NSDI '24 website; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.

Conflicts

At submission time, you must provide information about conflicts with PC members. A PC member is a conflict if any of the following three circumstances applies:

Institution: You are currently employed at the same institution, have been previously employed at the same institution within the past two years (not counting concluded internships), or are going to begin employment at the same institution during the review period.

Advisor: You have a past or present association as thesis advisor or advisee.

Collaboration: You have a collaboration on a project, publication, grant proposal, program co-chairship, or editorship within the past two years (since April 2021).

You must not improperly identify a PC member as a conflict if none of these circumstances applies, even if for some other reason you want to avoid them reviewing your paper. The chairs will review paper conflicts to ensure the integrity of the reviewing process, adding or removing conflicts if necessary. The chairs may reject abstracts or papers on the basis of egregious missing or extraneous conflicts. If you have any questions about conflicts, please contact the program co-chairs.

Ethical Considerations

Papers describing experiments with users or user data (e.g., network traffic, passwords, social network information), should follow the basic principles of ethical research, e.g., beneficence (maximizing the benefits to an individual or to society while minimizing harm to the individual), minimal risk (appropriateness of the risk versus benefit ratio), voluntary consent, respect for privacy, and limited deception. When appropriate, authors are encouraged to include a subsection describing these issues. Authors may want to consult the Menlo Report for further information on ethical principles, or the Allman/Paxson IMC '07 paper for guidance on ethical data sharing.

Authors must, as part of the submission process, attest that their work complies with all applicable ethical standards of their home institution(s), including, but not limited to, privacy policies and policies on experiments involving humans. Note that submitting research for approval by one's institution's ethics review body is necessary, but not sufficient—in cases where the PC has concerns about the ethics of the work in a submission, the PC will have its own discussion of the ethics of that work. The PC's review process may examine the ethical soundness of the paper just as it examines the technical soundness.

Processes for Accepted Papers

If your paper is accepted and you need an invitation letter to apply for a visa to attend the conference, please contact conference@usenix.org as soon as possible. Visa applications are reportedly taking more than two months to process. Please identify yourself as a presenter or an author, and include your mailing address in your email request.

Accepted papers will be shepherded through an editorial review process by a member of the Program Committee. Based on initial feedback from the Program Committee, authors of shepherded papers will submit an editorial revision of their paper to their Program Committee shepherd. The shepherd will review the paper and give the author additional comments. Authors will upload their final file to the submissions system by the final paper deadline for the conference Proceedings.

By submitting a paper, you agree that at least one of the authors will attend the conference to present it. If the conference registration fee will pose a hardship for the presenter of the accepted paper, please contact conference@usenix.org.

All papers will be available online to registered attendees before the conference. If your accepted paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org. The papers will be available online to everyone beginning on the first day of the conference.

Best Paper Awards

Awards will be given for the best paper(s) at the conference.

Community Award

To encourage broader code and data sharing within the NSDI community, the conference will also present a "Community Award" for the best paper whose code and/or data set is made publicly available by the final papers deadline. Authors who would like their paper to be considered for this award will have the opportunity to tag their paper during the submission process.