FAST '25 Preliminary Call for Papers

Overview

The 23rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '25) brings together researchers and practitioners to explore new directions in the design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of systems related to storage. The program committee interprets storage-related systems broadly: submissions on low-level storage devices, distributed storage systems, information and data management, as well as other systems interconnected with storage are all of interest. The conference will consist of technical presentations including refereed papers and poster sessions.

Topics

The topics of interest to FAST are various aspects of systems related to storage. These include and overlap with, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Archival systems
• AI for storage and storage for AI
• Auditing and provenance
• Big data, analytics, and data sciences
• Caching, replication, and consistency
• Cloud, multi- and hybrid-cloud environments
• Data deduplication and compression
• Database storage
• Distributed and networked storage (wide-area, grid, peer-to-peer)
• Emerging memory hierarchy design
• Empirical evaluation
• Experience with deployed systems
• File system design
• Hardware design and prototypes
• HPC systems, including parallel I/O
• Key-value and NoSQL storage
• Management
• Memory-only storage systems
• Mobile, personal, embedded, and home storage
• Networking
• Novel and emerging storage technologies (e.g., DNA and glass storage)
• Performance and QoS
• Power-aware storage architectures
• RAID and erasure coding
• Reliability, availability, and disaster tolerance
• Search and data retrieval
• Security

Submission Instructions

Please submit your short and long papers by 11:59 pm PDT on September 17, 2024, in PDF format via the submission form, which will be available here soon. Do not email submissions. There is no separate deadline for abstract submissions.

• The complete submission must be no longer than 12 pages for long papers and no longer than 6 pages for short papers, excluding references. The program committee values conciseness: if you can express an idea in fewer pages than the limit, do so.
• Supplemental material is optional and may be added (if deemed really necessary) as a single separate PDF file without page limits. However, the reviewers are not required to read or consider such material. All content that should be considered to judge the paper is not supplemental and should be part of the main submitted file.
• Papers must be typeset on U.S. letter-sized pages in two columns using 10-point Times Roman font on 12-point leading (single-spaced), within a text block 7" wide by 9" deep.
• Labels, captions, and other text in figures, graphs, and tables must use font sizes that, when printed, do not require magnification to be legible. References must not be set in a smaller font. Submissions that violate these requirements will not be reviewed. Limits will be enforced strictly. No extensions will be given for reformatting.
• A LaTeX template and style file are available on the USENIX templates page.
• Double-blind policy: Authors must not be identified in the submissions, either explicitly or by implication. To refer to your previous work, consider it as written by a third party. Do not say "reference removed for blind review." Supplemental material must be anonymized. Submissions violating anonymization rules will not be considered for review. If you are uncertain about how to anonymize your submission, please contact the program co-chairs, fast25chairs@usenix.org, well in advance of the submission deadline.
• Prior Workshop Paper Policy: If a submission extends a prior workshop paper, please include an anonymized copy of the workshop paper as supplemental material. This should be the same as the published version, with any identifying information removed.
• Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. See the USENIX Conference Submissions Policy for details.
• If you are uncertain whether your submission meets USENIX's guidelines, contact the program co-chairs, fast25chairs@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.
• Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered.
• Submissions should abide by the Conflict Identification guidelines (see below).

The program committee and external reviewers will judge papers on technical merit, significance, relevance, and presentation. Research papers on new and unexplored problems are encouraged. A good research paper:

• addresses a significant problem;
• presents an interesting, compelling solution;
• demonstrates the benefits and drawbacks of the solution;
• draws appropriate conclusions using sound experimental methods;
• clearly describes what the authors have done; and
• clearly articulates the advances beyond previous work.

Program committee members, USENIX, and the broader community generally value a paper more highly if it is accompanied by artifacts not previously available. These artifacts may include traces, original data, source code, or tools developed as part of the submitted work.

Blind reviewing of all papers will be done by the program committee, assisted by outside referees when necessary. Accepted papers will be shepherded by a member of the program committee.

Short Papers

This year, in addition to long papers (up to 12 pages), FAST also solicits short papers (up to 6 pages long). Just like full-length papers, short papers should describe completed research where the problem statement, proposed solution, and evaluation are all logically complete and conclusions are drawn. While short papers are held to the same high standards as long papers, they tend to comprise smaller contributions that require a shorter description and less analysis than in full papers.

We emphasize that papers that describe early-stage research that is not yet fully evaluated are not suitable for this short-paper category. That is, preliminary or work-in-progress papers generally considered in workshops such as HotStorage do not fall within the scope of short papers.

For short papers, the title should be prefixed with "Short Paper: ", followed by the title. The prefix will not be published in the proceedings and short papers will not be called out as such in the program. Authors must also indicate that they are submitting a short paper by checking the appropriate checkbox on the submission form. The program committee will not accept a full paper on the condition that it is cut down to fit in the short paper page limit, nor will it invite short papers to be extended to full length. Submissions will be considered only in the category in which they are submitted.

To see examples of qualified short papers, we encourage authors to browse short papers accepted at prior FAST conferences—from 2012 to 2020. Short papers will be published in the proceedings, and authors will be allocated a shorter speaking slot during the conference.

Deployed-Systems Papers

In addition to papers that describe original research, FAST also solicits papers that describe real operational systems, including systems currently in production. Such papers should address experience with the practical design, implementation, analysis, deployment, or operation of such systems. We encourage the submission of papers that disprove or strengthen existing assumptions, deepen the understanding of existing problems, and validate known techniques in environments in which they were never before used or tested, with preference given to experimental results based on production data. Deployed-system papers will be treated similarly to other papers for publication purposes; they need not present new ideas or results to be accepted but should offer useful guidance to practitioners.

A good deployed-systems paper:

• clearly articulates lessons learned from deploying in production;
• describes an operational system of broad interest;
• discusses practical problems encountered in production; and
• supports the lessons with appropriate evidence, potentially including statistical data from the actual deployment, empirical evaluation of the system (on production platforms rather than small testbeds), and anecdotes.

For deployed systems papers, the title should be prefixed with "Deployed System: ", followed by the title. The prefix will not be published in the proceedings. Authors must also indicate that they are submitting a deployed-systems paper by checking the appropriate checkbox on the submission form. If a paper is both short and falls in the deployed systems category, both prefixes should be used (in any order), and both checkboxes selected.

Double-blind Policy for Deployed-system Paper: All submissions for FAST '25 are required to follow the double-blind policy (see above). However, with deployed-system papers, the product or company described in the paper need not be anonymized (unlike author names).

Author Response Period

FAST '25 will allow authors to respond to reviews prior to final decision, according to the schedule above. Authors must limit their response to correcting factual errors in the reviews, to addressing questions posed by reviewers, and to clarifying the ideas in the paper. Responses may include new experiments and data in response to a reviewer's request. Responses are optional and limited to 1000 words. FAST will be enforcing a hard limit on the length of the author's response for fairness and to reduce workload (for both authors and reviewers): exceeding the word limit will impact a paper negatively.

Conflict Identification

Upon submitting your paper, authors must indicate conflicts with PC members. A conflict exists in one of the following cases:

Institution: You are currently employed at the same institution, have been previously employed at the same institution within the past two years, or are going to begin employment at the same institution. A completed internship does not constitute an institutional conflict.

Advisor/Advisee: Doctoral thesis advisor and post-doctoral advisor (if relevant) are conflicts for life.

Collaboration: You have a collaboration on a project, publication, grant proposal, or editorship within the past two years.

Close friends and family: Close family relations (e.g., spouse, parent/child, sibling) and close friends are conflicts forever if they are potential reviewers.

The PC will review paper conflicts to ensure the integrity of the reviewing process, adding conflicts if necessary. If there is no basis for conflicts indicated by authors, such conflicts will be removed. Do not identify PC members as a conflict solely to avoid having them as reviewers. If you have any questions about conflicts, contact the program co-chairs.

Author Notification and Beyond

Authors will be notified of paper acceptance or rejection according to the schedule above. If your paper is accepted and you need an invitation letter to apply for a visa to attend the conference, contact conference@usenix.org as soon as possible. Visa applications are reportedly taking more than two months to process. Please identify yourself as a presenter or an author, and include your mailing address in your email request.

Early Rejection Notification. This year, we will notify authors of papers that are rejected early in the process, prior to the author response period. The goal is to allow authors of early rejected papers to use reviewer feedback earlier and resubmit to another conference as soon as possible. Early rejected papers will no longer be considered under submission (regarding multiple submission policies) upon receipt of a rejection notification.

All papers will be available online to registered attendees no earlier than Friday, January 31, 2025. If your accepted paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org. The papers will be available online to everyone beginning on the first day of the main conference, Tuesday, February 25, 2025. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX FAST '25 website; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.

By submitting a paper, you agree that at least one of the authors will attend the conference to present it. If the conference registration fee will pose a hardship for the presenter of the accepted paper, please contact conference@usenix.org.