[HN Gopher] Usenix ATC Announcement
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Usenix ATC Announcement
Author : eatbitseveryday
Score : 106 points
Date : 2025-05-09 03:18 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usenix.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usenix.org)
| aoki wrote:
| > 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.
| gjvc wrote:
| I was there in San Diego in 2000. It was amazing.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| A nice write-up of a sad milestone
| zinekeller wrote:
| 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).
| jamesblonde wrote:
| 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!?!?
| jamesblonde wrote:
| 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.
| nycerrrrrrrrrr wrote:
| 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).
| jamesblonde wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101c wrote:
| While the ATC is no longer, Usenix does have other ones:
|
| * https://www.usenix.org/conferences
| mjb wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2025-05-09 23:02 UTC)