Jordan Hubbard encouraged us to go to USENIX ATC (Annual Technical Conference) 2016 in Denver, Colorado. “I really think both of you should get a taste of this and start getting to know how folks interact with each other over at conferences,” he said. We took his word for it and in retrospect, we’re glad we did!
From the moment we reached the conference floor, the place was all hustle and bustle with attendees, speakers, and USENIX staff. We made our way to the registration desk and ran into our friend Deb Goodkin from the FreeBSD Foundation. We exchanged greetings and discussed FreeBSD’s involvement in USENIX and then went off to attend the first round of talks.
To be honest, the first couple of talks were hard on us. A lot of them were about esoteric research that solved for edge cases. We were starting to lose confidence when we stumbled on a hidden gem, “BlockStack: A Global Naming and Storage System Secured by Blockchains“, given by Muneeb Ali and Jude Nelson from Blockstack Labs. Their product, Blockstack, is a decentralized approach to DNS and PKI Certificates that uses an infrastructure similar to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency so that no individual can control the domain names and certificates within their special web browser. We enjoyed the talk thoroughly as it was informative and revealed new techniques for solving prevalent issues while still managing to be succinct.
During dinner, we made it a point to mingle with the speakers who had spoken on file systems and had research interests in them. Much to our surprise, very few of them knew about the amazing features of ZFS. We explained why iXsystems uses ZFS in our products and urged them to include it in their research.
Afterwards, we attended the Blockstack BOF (Birds of a Feather) session. We discussed scenarios and other technical aspects until almost 10:30 pm! We again informed them about our company’s interest in new storage technologies and we discussed ways to integrate our products with each other. Overall, it was a very cool and insightful experience.
The next morning, we attended the Keynote: “A Wardrobe for the Emperor: Stitching Practical Bias into Systems Software Research” given by Bryan Cantrill, the CTO of Joyent. This was probably the most fun keynote that we have attended. Bryan spoke candidly about how USENIX is no longer beneficial for practitioners (software developers doing production-level work) and how it has become a super specialized, academically-oriented, research-level conference. We later attended a BOF on the same topic where we discussed how to improve the format of USENIX to re-include the average practitioner.
On the second day, we went to a talk given by Anne Farrell from the University of Chicago about a framework called MEANTIME, which reduces the accuracy of the information delivery to increase the timeliness and reduce energy consumption. We also attended a talk on the FSCQ File System given by Daniel Ziegler from MIT. The FSCQ file system is the first file system to provably preserve data upon a crash. The file system is still a very basic academic project but its methods could be usable someday to protect precious data from disasters.
On the last day, we attended a few more talks before heading back home. One talk in particular worth mentioning was on Multicore Locks by Hugo Guiroux. His talk explored various synchronization methods and their lock library that provides applications with different types of locks for various contexts.
Attending USENIX ATC for the first time was an enlightening experience. Jordan had told us that there are two tracks in the normal USENIX conference sessions, but he also mentioned a third one—the “hallway track” where attendees can mingle, exchange ideas, and network with their peers.
In our joint experience, this hallway track proved to be the most valuable by far. We spoke to a lot of authors, got to know people from all over the country who are doing operating systems research, and gained a huge amount of information this way. We look forward to going to this conference again in the future.
Suraj Ravichandran & Erin Clark
iXsystems Software Developers
