Usenix ATC Announcement (opens in new tab)

> 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.

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!?!?

A nice write-up of a sad milestone