Usenix ATC Announcement | Hacker News Reader

Usenix ATC Announcement

usenix.org

> Although numerous papers continue to be submitted to USENIX ATC with significant research being reviewed, accepted, and presented, the community has evolved, and now attends conferences other than USENIX ATC. From 1,698 attendees in San Diego in 2000, ATC attendance dwindled to 165 attendees in Santa Clara in 2024

It became a write-only conference :-(

I remember reading the NFS and Kerberos papers in school.

I was there in San Diego in 2000. It was amazing.

This makes sense, especially with the move of OSDI to being annual, and NSDI accepting more and more general systems-y work (e.g. we published the Firecracker paper at NSDI, which wouldn't have made sense even 5 years earlier). ATC was left in a difficult niche, but still a valuable venue for "hackier" systems work, industry systems papers of the less quantitative kind, and a few others.

I'd love to see OSDI evolve to accept more of this work, and look at the ATC work that has stood the test of time and accept more work like that. Maybe SOSP and Eurosys too. I bet USENIX is going to figure this out - they're generally a smart and well-run organization.

Fun fact: we won best industry paper at ATC'23 for "On-demand container loading in AWS Lambda" (https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc23/presentation/brooker). I was super happy with it as a paper and got a ton of good feedback on it. About six months earlier, it'd been desk-rejected by the chair of another systems conference who asked that we don't submit such low-quality work to them.

The page itself explains the funding crunch, but looking on the 2025 ATC page:

> Gold Sponsors > National Science Foundation

I am thinking on how large is the impact of recent events in the White House versus a more perennial problem (it looks like the latter, although the former certainly won't help).

While the ATC is no longer, Usenix does have other ones:

* https://www.usenix.org/conferences

Great conference throughout the years. I think there was a failure of imagination, though. When numbers dwindled, why not do what other top tier systems conferences do - move outside the US and Bay Area!?!?

I know the answer as to why it didn't. A place on the PC or steering committee became so important for tenure/promotion in the US, that it was 90%+ US people - a social group factor. That led to no attempt to widen the circle of general interest. If they had come to Europe 20 years ago, it would have been huge and breathed new life into Usenix ATC.

Not sure what you mean by "US people" - the PC is mostly (but definitely not 90%) US based, but that follows from systems research being largely US based (for now, at least).

90% of systems researchers are not US-based. My point is that it didn't embrace global leadership in systems research as a conference. It died because it didn't grow. Eurosys was created as a counter-weight to Europeans not being able to get on the PC of conferences like Usenix ATC. It's still going strong.

PC membership is not necessary for tenure/promotion. Eg my advisor has only been on ~5 PCs in a ten-year career, and has gained tenure at two top-10 CS schools. In general it’s more of a checkmark.

ATC had more submissions than Eurosys, and a lower acceptance rate.

A nice write-up of a sad milestone

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