Trip Report from USENIX ATC 2013

I spent half of the week at USENIX ATC in San Jose. I previously attended in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2004, and I have been to other more academic USENIX conferences in the intervening years such as FAST and OSDI, but I have not made it back to Annual Tech in nearly a decade.

The conference is very familiar but has also definitely changed since '04 (no more terminal rooms and the BoF board was nearly empty!) I was very happy with the caliber of the accepted papers in the main conferences as well as in many of the workshops of Federated Conferences Week (HotStorage, HotCloud, etc.). There is less industry and open-source participation now, but still a variety of really interesting talks about storage, networking, operating systems, virtualization, and more from academia and (a smaller subset of) industry.

As I've previously noted on this blog, I think the BSD conferences are great, but that it is very important for the FreeBSD community to also present work at some of the broader open-source and academic systems conferences. I would be much more likely to attend EuroBSDCon if it were held adjacent to EuroSys or FOSDEM, for example. And would be more likely to attend a U.S.-based BSD conference if it were held adjacent to a USENIX or O'Reilly Strata event.

On Wednesday my team presented one of our main projects of last year, Janus: Optimal Flash Provisioning for Cloud Storage Workloads. This work describes a method for automatically segregating hot and cold storage workloads in a large distributed filesystem, formulates an optimization problem to match the available flash to different workloads in such a way as to maximize the total reads going to flash, and then places that hot data on the distributed flash devices instead of distributed disk devices.

There were a number of other really interesting talks about flash, virtualization, and distributed storage systems, but I wanted to highlight two short-papers that I think would most appeal to the FreeBSD audience here:

• Practical and Effective Sandboxing for Non-root Users, Taesoo Kim and Nickolai Zeldovich, MIT CSAIL
  This was a nice practical short paper about interposing system calls, using unionfs in a clever way, and taking some revision control ideas for a nice little tool.
• packetdrill: Scriptable Network Stack Testing, from Sockets to Packets, Neal Cardwell, Yuchung Cheng, Lawrence Brakmo, Matt Mathis, Barath Raghavan, Nandita Dukkipati, Hsiao-keng Jerry Chu, Andreas Terzis, and Tom Herbert, Google
  Another practical short paper about a portable tool, which works on FreeBSD or Linux, that enables testing the correctness and performance of entire TCP/UDP/IP network stack implementations, from the system call layer to the hardware network interface, for both IPv4 and IPv6. This tool was instrumental in identifying 10 bugs in the Linux network stack and enabling the development of three new features: TCP—Early Retransmit, Fast Open, and Loss Probes.

I'm not sure if I'll go to FAST, or USENIX ATC, or both next year, but it's likely I'll attend at least one. What other industry conferences outside of the BSDCan/EuroBSDCon circuit does the FreeBSD community congregate at these days? For folks that have been in industry 10+ years, do you go to more or less industry conferences now than in the past?