Overview
Publishing at USENIX LISA Means Industry Impact and Recognition
LISA is the premier conference for system administrators from all areas of technology to come together and exchange ideas. Papers published here get visibility and recognition from our reviewers and attendees, who are a unique group of researchers and practitioners, truly embedded in the building and operation of the systems that run the world. For a researcher, publishing at LISA proves that your work is relevant and applicable to industry. Many tools—such as CFEngine, which has transformed our approach to systems management—have had their key publications at USENIX LISA. There is no other conference where the potential for industry impact is as high!

USENIX Stands for Open Access and Moving the World Forward
USENIX has a clear stance on open access and strongly maintains that research is meant for the community as a whole. Your paper and your presentation will be available online at no charge, where it can have the most impact and reach the broadest possible audience. Your paper will also be part of the conference proceedings with its own ISBN.

Topics of Interest
LISA is interested in papers that cover everything related to the field and area of system administration. We welcome papers in several areas, including but not limited to:

Cloud computing
Cloud infrastructure management
Cloud performance tuning
Cloud architectures
Cloud best practices
Cloud operating systems
Systems engineering
Configuration management
Deployment automation
Continuous integration
Release engineering
Automated testing
Software-defined networking (SDN)
Large-scale computing
High-performance computing
Security
Authentication
Developer/operations (DevOps)
Monitoring and analytics
Visualization of metrics
Metric analysis methods
Tools and approaches for metric collection
IT management methods
Creating a positive ops culture
System administration profession
Education and training
Interest organizations
Our refereed papers describe new techniques, tools, theories, inventions, and present case histories that extend our understanding of system and network administration. They present new ideas, backed by rigorous and repeatable methodology, in the context of previous related work, and can have a broad impact on operations and future research.

System administration is a broad topic, and good papers take a variety of approaches. A few examples include:

Description/analysis of a new technique, tool, technology, or theory
Applying an existing technique, tool, etc., in a novel or perhaps controversial way
Critical analysis of the alternatives for solving a common problem, including new recommendations
New lessons learned from a detailed and honest evaluation of a case study
The crucial component of all of these is something new or timely, perhaps controversial, and something that was not previously available, discussed, considered, or recognized.

Cash prizes will be awarded at the conference for the best refereed paper and the best refereed paper with a student as lead author.

Posters
The program committee realizes that potential authors may not be quite ready to submit their work as a refereed paper. This is where the poster session comes to the rescue. If you have been researching an idea but you haven’t had the resources to construct a full paper or if you are working on an idea and would like feedback and insights from industry professionals, you should strongly consider submitting a poster. There are several advantages to presenting your work in this fashion:

Your poster abstract (500 words or less) will be published in the LISA '14 Proceedings and your research site will be linked off the conference page.
You will get valuable feedback from the community on the clarity and value of, and perceived obstacles to, your research in its current form, which will enable you to improve the quality of your future submission to LISA.
An accepted paper primarily receives attention during a small question and answer window at the end of its presentation. Your poster will be a subject of conversation throughout the entire poster session period and probably beyond.
Your poster is an immediate icebreaker that will help you make new friends and other contacts at one of the highest attended USENIX conferences.
We hope that you will consider sharing your ongoing research with the LISA community. Please note that the deadline for poster abstracts this year is April 14, 2014, the same as for paper submissions. If you have any questions beyond this CFP, please contact lisa14posters@usenix.org.

Submission Information
For more information on submitting a paper or poster, please see the Submitting Papers and Posters page.