LISA is the Large Installation System Administration Conference, co-sponsored by the computing professional organizations USENIX and its LISA special interest group (formerly known as SAGE).
Contents
The word "large" was dropped from the title of the 6th conference in 1992 (though retaining the "LISA" name). The full acronym was restored in the title of the 2003 conference and remains in use today. The definition of "large" was originally understood to mean sites with over 100 users or over 100 terabytes of storage.
History
The LISA conference were first held in 1986. The USENIX web site lists proceedings as far back as 1987, though only those proceedings from 1993 onward are available online. Attendance has recently been in the 1000-2000 range.
Content
The conference is typically held in the fall in a conference center hotel somewhere in the United States. Between 1987 and 2008, roughly half of them were somewhere in California. It generally runs six days: six days of full-day and half-day tutorial training sessions, three days of technical sessions, and a two-day vendor exhibition. The technical sessions usually include multiple tracks, including a peer reviewed refereed paper track, invited talks, and a "Guru-Is-In" Q&A track.
For many years, the conference often ended with a LISA quiz show trivia contest, but that has been replaced with a plenary session to close out the week.
Proceedings
The refereed papers are published in a proceedings volume. Many important topics in system administration were first disseminated publicly via LISA papers.