ATC Topic Selection

Decide the venue before drafting. ATC — the ACM SIGOPS Annual Technical Conference, for about fifty years the USENIX Annual Technical Conference — is the systems community's broad, practical venue. It emphasizes implementations and experimental results across the whole systems stack and takes a wider slice than the more selective OSDI/SOSP flagships. The decisive question is rarely "is this systems?" but "is this a solid, useful, measured systems result — and is ATC's breadth the right home versus a more specialized or more selective venue?"

What ATC rewards

• Built and measured systems across a broad scope: operating systems, runtime systems, parallel and distributed systems, storage, networking, security and privacy, virtualization, hardware-software interaction, performance and workload characterization, reliability, availability, scalability, energy, and bug-finding / tracing / troubleshooting — "of all scales, from embedded devices to data centers and clouds."
• Useful over merely novel. A solid, well-engineered, carefully measured system that a flagship might call incremental is squarely in scope if it is real and the evaluation is honest.
• Deployed-systems / experience papers. ATC has a lane for papers about real-world deployed systems that need not present new ideas — they are judged on practical insight. (Continuity of the named track under SIGOPS is 待核实, but the appetite for experience papers is long-standing.)

Sibling-venue routing table

Signal in your project	Better home	Why
Solid, useful, measured systems work of broad interest; usefulness over novelty	ATC	The broad practical-systems venue; welcomes strong engineering + honest measurement
A large, novel systems contribution aimed at the flagship bar	OSDI / SOSP	More selective, novelty-forward; different calendars and no extended-abstract gate
The contribution is a networked-systems design (dataplane, protocols, RDMA, congestion)	NSDI	Networked-systems center; its own multi-deadline model
Broad systems, but EuroSys's cycle lands sooner or fits the community	EuroSys	The other broad SIGOPS-family systems conference; choose by calendar/pull
The core is file and storage systems depth	FAST	Storage's specialized home
A provocative idea or early design with argument but no built system	HotOS / HotStorage / workshop	Position/early-work venues; ATC wants a built, measured system
A real deployed system with practical lessons but no new idea	ATC (Deployed Systems lane)	ATC explicitly values experience papers

The breadth and deployed-systems tests

Two quick tests sharpen a borderline verdict:

• Breadth-vs-selectivity test: if the paper's strength is careful engineering and honest measurement of something genuinely useful — rather than a headline-novel mechanism — ATC's broad, practical bar fits better than OSDI/SOSP's selectivity. Do not withhold a solid, useful system from ATC because it is "not flagship-novel."
• Deployed-systems test: if the contribution is the experience of running a real system at scale — what broke, what you learned, what others should copy — ATC's experience lane is a real home, where "no new idea" is not a rejection reason.

Evidence maturity, without the ladder cliché

Fit is necessary but not sufficient: the same idea sits at different doors depending on how far the system has come. An idea with an argument but no implementation is a HotOS-style position paper; a prototype measured only on inputs you chose needs a real testbed and workloads before the research track; a networked-systems design whose contribution is the network belongs at NSDI. Submitting one step early earns a "promising, but build and measure it" and costs a cycle.

Cheap reconnaissance before committing

[Scope]   scan the last two ATC programs (dblp: USENIX ATC; the SIGOPS ATC page) for your subarea
          -> several recent papers = a reviewer pool exists; none = opening or mismatch
[Citations] is your bibliography majority systems venues (ATC/OSDI/SOSP/NSDI/EuroSys/FAST)?
          -> majority elsewhere => reviewers read you as a visitor; naturalize the intro first
[Calendar] compare ATC's June deadline / November conference with OSDI/NSDI/EuroSys/FAST dates
          -> route to the nearest honest fit; ATC 2026 is Hong Kong, Nov 15-18
[Bar]     is the paper "useful and solid" (ATC) or "novel and large" (OSDI/SOSP)? be honest

Decision procedure

[Audience]   who acts differently if the system works? -> systems builders/operators/researchers?
[Claim type] built-system / technique+implementation / architecture / experience / measurement study
[ATC vs flagship] solid+useful -> ATC; novel+large -> OSDI/SOSP
[Specialist check] network core -> NSDI; storage core -> FAST; idea-only -> HotOS/workshop
[Verdict]    ATC research track / Deployed Systems lane / sibling venue / workshop, with a one-line reason

Run this before the writing skills; a wrong venue decision wastes every later step. When the verdict is ATC, continue with atc-workflow for the June-anchored calendar and atc-writing-style for the self-standing extended abstract and the systems-paper shape.