Lessons learned from the HotOS rejection

We submitted a paper to HotOS'11 and was recently rejected. Although it is not comfortable to admit the weakness pointed out by the reviewers, lessons are still valuable for the future research and academia life.

I re-thought the points we made and the emphasized contributions in that paper, and surprisingly found that we actually headed to an incorrect direction that has so few related interests of HotOS.

About the paper: The paper is about augmenting OSes with the GPU. We used some programming tricks to make GPU code callable from a Linux kernel.

Some lessons:

• We filled most content of the paper with the technical challenges and solutions, in which the challenges can be easily eliminated by very-near-future development of GPUs. What's more surprising is that we even also pointed out the near-future solutions to those challenges but still wrote almost two of the limited five overall pages of fluffy to show off our techniques. This is definitely not acceptable wrt. the HotOS, which focuses on the long-run trends and solutions. The review comments also pointed out that mis-directed writing.
• We failed to identify the problem. Until recently when I keep revising my research proposal I realized that we didn't yet point out any problem in that paper. The widely deployed GPUs and ignorance of OSes are absolutely not problems! They are current states. The problem is that the because of the development of various applications, OS needs more computing resources that the current CPUs can not give and what's more, current OSes are not designed with partitioning-based parallel algorithms so that they can not process a single large request by splitting it and handling them on different cores. Simply, the lack of computing resources and obsoleted parallel design of OSes are the two problems we need to solve. It just happens that GPUs are widely deployed and idled and they even happen to have massively parallel processing power.
• We fail to defend ourselves by explaining why GPU will make things different but not previously existed cryptographic accelerators. It is simple, GPUs are widely deployed and available on almost every machines but other accelerators are not. We did mentioned the wide-deployment of GPUs, but did not say the comparison EXPLICITLY.
• I did not discuss this idea with different experts and professionals to get responses and comments for improving and consolidating it. The original idea is easy to be a weak one. Comments and feedbacks and critics will let me make it perfect to against attack by changing it to a maybe totally different idea or direction.
• I do need do things as soon as possible rather than put off and delay it until the deadline. So that there would be time to broadcast it for feedbacks and comments and hence improvement.

Hope it will be getting better.

The paper link (pdf).